Listen.
Faint scrabbling sound from within, off to the right. He threw himself inside, falling and twisted in the air, saw vague movement above the rise of a breakfast bar and fired at it. Another gun went off at the same time and he felt a second impact in the ribs. But the edges of the bar ripped apart in flying splinters, and the darkened form in the kitchenette behind blew backwards. Wet, uncooked meat noise and a shriek. He hit the ground, skidded painfully into the back of a woodframe armchair.
And everything stopped again.
This time for real.
‘It’s simple enough,’ he told Norton, after the interrogation was done. They were playing an inept game of pool on the garish orange table. ‘I don’t have to find Onbekend now. He’ll come to me.’
‘If he doesn’t just have you picked off at whatever airport you’re planning to use.’
‘Yeah, well, like I said they’re kind of busy right now. And I’ll be going in under a fresh identity. No COLIN badge, no UNGLA accreditation, no weapons, nothing to ring any bells.’
Norton paused, chin hovering over the cue. ‘No weapons?’
‘Not as such, no. I aim to look like a tourist.’
‘And this fresh identity.’ The COLIN exec rammed his shot home. ‘I assume you’re looking to me for that.’
‘No, I’ve got a friend back in London can handle that for me, have the stuff couriered across inside a day. What I need from you is the cash. Free wafers, untraceable back to COLIN. My credit still good for that?’
‘You know it is.’
‘Good. And can you persuade RimSec to keep Ferrer locked up somewhere until end of next week? Make sure he doesn’t have a change of heart and go squawking down the wires to Bambaren?’
‘I suppose so.’ Norton looked vainly for position, tried a double, took it too fast and missed. ‘But look. You don’t know this Jurgens will be there. What if she’s not sleeping yet?’
‘It’s November, Norton.’ Carl chalked his cue. ‘Jurgens was almost flaking out when I talked to her nearly three weeks ago. She’s got to be under by now.’
‘I thought they had drugs that’ll unlock the hibernation.’
‘Yeah.’ Carl lined up his shot, eased back with due regard for the scarred yellow wall behind him. Sharp snap and the target ball disappeared into a corner pocket as if sucked there by vacuum. The cueball stood solid in its place. ‘I knew this hibernoid back on Mars, we used to go the same tanindo classes. He was a private detective, occasional enforcer too. Very tough guy, always getting into scrapes. I don’t think I ever knew him when he wasn’t carrying some kind of injury. And he told me that no beating he ever took hurt as much as the time he dosed himself with that wake-up shit.’
‘Yeah, but if they’re worried about-’
‘Norton, they don’t know any reason why I’d be coming after them like this. They don’t know Ertekin was anything to me. And if there’s going to be any COLIN fallout in the air, the very best thing Onbekend can do with his girlfriend right now is put her away somewhere safe and cosy for the next several months. Believe me, she’s there. Just a question of getting to her, digging in and waiting for Onbekend to come running. And then killing the motherfucker.’
He slammed the next shot, rattled it in the jaws. It didn’t go down.
He peeled off his coat, unslung the sharkpunch and dumped it on the kitchenette bar. He checked himself for damage. The Marstech impact jacket, disguised through airport security as part of his scuba gear, had soaked up the slugs he’d collected and left him with no worse than bruising, maybe a couple of cracked ribs. He pressed on the tender areas, grimaced and shrugged. He’d got off lightly.
So far.
He stripped the dead men of their weapons, piled them up on the shot-splintered breakfast bar. He dragged the worst of the wreckage from the man he’d killed in the kitchenette out the door and left him with his companions. He’d get the rest with a mop and bucket if there was time.
In the upstairs gallery of the lodge, he found a room that extended back into the cliff the house was built against. There was a heavy-duty lock on the door but he shot it out with one of his several newly acquired handguns. The door swung weightily inward on a curved womb-like space lit by subdued orange LCLS panelling at knee height along the walls. He found a panel of switches next to the door and flipped them until a harsher white light sprang up. Assumption confirmed - he’d found Greta Jurgens.
She lay like some dead Viking noblewoman on a broad, carved wood platform with lines that vaguely suggested a boat. Thick tangles of grey-green insulene foam netting supported her and wrapped her over. Carl could smell the stuff as he stepped towards her, the signature nanotech reek of tightly engineered carbon plastics. He’d used the netting on Mars a lot, camping out on expeditions in the Wells uplands.
-Flash recall of sitting out in the warm glow of a heating element while the Martian night came on in all its thin-air glory, thick shingles of stars everywhere and the tiny, on-and-off tracery of burn-up from the left-over seed particles as they kept coming down, decades overdue for their date with atmospheric modification. Sutherland, staring up there at it all, pleased smile on the scarred ebony features, like all of it, the sky and everything in it, had been put there just for him. Musing, nodding along with whatever it was the young Carl Marsalis had been bitching about. Soaking it up, then turning it around so Carl’d have to look at it from an angle that hadn’t occurred to him before. You ever wondered, soak, if that doesn’t just mean . . . . . .
Jurgens stirred just barely as the lights came up, but the down end of her cycle had her buried too deep for any substantial reaction. She was naked in the foam, skin taut and shiny with the adipose buildup, lidded eyes bruised and gummed shut with the secretions of the hibernoid sleep. Carl stood looking down at her for a long while, handgun at the end of his arm like a hammer. Images of the last month flickered behind his eyes like flames, like something burning down.
South Florida State. The Perez nanorack. Sevgi Ertekin beside him on the beach. New York, and the futon she made up for him. Gunfire in the street outside, the first warm crushing pressure as he flattened her under him.
Istanbul, the walk to Moda. The gleaming, glittering grins-in-darkness escaping feel to everything they did.
His mouth twitched upward in echo.
The wind across the stones at Sacsayhuaman. Sevgi leaned against the jeep at his back, the tight feeling of cover, of safety.
The road to Arequipa, her face in the soft dashboard glow.
San Francisco and Bulgakov’s Cat, the predawn view out of starboard loading. Don’t gloat, Marsalis. It’s not attractive.
Sevgi dead.
The smile fell off his face. He stared down at the sleeping woman.
Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?
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.
The mesh surged a little in the pit of his stomach, maybe aftermath of the firefight, maybe something else. He thought of Sevgi’s eyes closing in the hospital. He stared at Jurgens like she was a problem he had to solve.
Only live with what you’ve done, and try in future to only do what you’re happy to live with. That’s the whole game, soak, that’s all there is.
He reached out left-handed. Spread the foam netting a little thicker over the hibernoid’s body, pulled it up where one pale shoulder was exposed.
Then he went rapidly back to the door and killed the bright white LCLS, because something was happening to his vision that felt like blindness. He stood a moment in the warm orange gloom, looked twitchily around as if someone was there next to him, then he slipped quietly out and closed the door behind him.
He moved along the gallery, checked doors until he found a darkened, windowless chamber with the fragrant hygiene reek of a woman’s bathroom. He stepped inside, touched the switch panel and more
bright white light exploded across the pastel tiled space. His own face mugged him from a big circular mirror in one wall - sweat-streaked whitener melting and streaking, the black coming up underneath, eyes ringed with the stuff like dark water at the bottom of a pair of pale psychedelic wells. Fuck, no wonder the guys at the bridge freaked. He supposed he owed Carmen Ren for the inspiration.
Wherever she was right now.
He wondered briefly if Ren would make it, if she’d stay ahead of the cudlips and the Agency the way she had before. He wondered if the child growing inside her would make it out into the world safely, and what would happen then. What Ren would have to do to protect it after that.
He remembered the level gaze, the way she’d backed him off with nothing more than a look and the way she stood, the reek of survivability that came off her as she faced him by the tower. Not a bad set of cards to play with. He thought she might be in with a better chance than most of her male counterparts.
Mostly, he was just glad he wouldn’t be the one sent to bring her down.
In a drawer beside the basin, he found capsules he recognised - codeine married to a tweaked caffeine delivery kick. They’d do for his ribs. He ran water from infrared taps into the broad, shallow scoop of marble in front of the mirror, soaped up and started washing the white shit off his face. It took a while. When he’d got the worst off, he stuck his head under the tap and ran the water on his scalp and the back of his neck. He took one of Greta Jurgens’ pastel towels off the rail beside the basin and scrubbed himself dry with it, stared into the mirror again and didn’t scare himself so much this time.
Now let’s see if you can scare Onbekend.
He crunched up the codeine in his mouth, dry-swallowed a couple of times, tongued the clogged residue off his teeth and rinsed it down with a swallow of water from the tap. He looked at himself once more in the mirror, as if his reflection might have some useful advice for him, then he shrugged and extinguished the light.
He went downstairs to wait.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ Norton told him.
Carl walked past him around the table, eyeing up the angles. ‘Yeah, I do.’
‘It isn’t going to bring her back.’
He settled to a long, narrow shot down the side cushion. ‘I think we’ve already had this argument.’
‘For Christ’s sake, I’m not arguing with you, Marsalis. I’m trying to make you see sense, maybe stop you throwing your life away down there. Look, Saturday is Sevgi’s funeral. I can get you cleared through Union immigration, and keep the police off your back for the time it’d take. Why don’t you come?’
‘Because, as far as I can see, that won’t bring her back either.’
Norton sighed. ‘This isn’t what she would have wanted, Marsalis.’
‘Norton, you don’t have the faintest fucking idea what Sevgi would have wanted.’ He rolled the shot, shaved the angle too fine and watched it knock the object ball into the cushion and away from the pocket. ‘And nor do I.’
‘Then why are you going down there?’
‘Because someone once told me the key to living with what you’ve done is to only do those things you’re happy to live with. And I can’t live with Sevgi dead and Onbekend still walking around.’
Carl braced his arms wide on the edge of the table and nodded at the messed-up tangle of balls on the table.
‘Your shot,’ he said. ‘See what you can make of that.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
The painkillers came on fast, left him with slight nausea and then a vague sense of well-being he could probably have done without. He prowled the lodge’s downstairs space, measuring angles of fire and thinking half-heartedly about defensibility. He toyed with the piled-up weaponry on the breakfast bar, couldn’t work up much interest there either. Something was in the way.
He found a place where he could sit and look along the canyon to the jumbled rise of mountains it lay among. Sunlight knifed down over the ridges, turned the air luminous and slightly unreal. As if it was what she’d been waiting for all along, Sevgi Ertekin stepped into his thoughts.
It was the same feeling, the way he’d felt her as he watched the light die away over the hills of Marin county, and again as he left the canyons of Manhattan by way of the 59th Street Bridge. He sat and let the sensation rinse through him, and with it he felt a creeping sense of comprehension, conscious thought catching up with the undefined the way he’d caught up with Gray. Maybe it was the codeine, tripping a synaptic switch somewhere, letting the understanding through. Sevgi was gone, his brain was wired to process that much successfully. But not that she was dead. For the ancient central African ancestor genes, that one just wouldn’t compute. People don’t just cease to exist, they don’t just vanish into thin fucking air. When people are gone, some deeply programmed part of his consciousness was insisting, it’s because they’re somewhere else, right? So Sevgi’s gone. Fine. So where’s she gone? Let’s find that out, because then we can fucking go there and find her, be with her and finally get rid of this fucking ache.
So.
Those hills dying into darkness on the other side of the bay - think she might be over there? Or in amongst all that glass and steel over there on the other side of the bridge, maybe? Or, okay, up this fucking canyon maybe, and over the other side of those mountains there. Maybe she’s there. Up past the luminous unreal light, up in the thin air, waiting there for you.
For the first time in his life, he saw why the cudlips might find it hard not to believe in an afterlife, in some other place you go when you’re gone from here.
And then, as he beat his own wiring, as the comprehension settled in, the feeling it had come to explain melted away, and left him nothing in its place but the raw pain in his chest, and the stinging salve of the hate.
And out of thin air, as if in answer, the helicopters came.
There were two of them, nondescript commercial machines, bumping down through the brilliant canyon air with the ungainly caution of crane flies. They quartered noisily back and forth, dipped about for a while, angled rotor blur shimmering in the sun, and then they held position over the river opposite the lodge. Carl watched bleakly from the shattered picture window. Enough carrying capacity in the two aircraft for a dozen men at least. He stayed back out of view, let the scattered corpses on the ground around the lodge door paint the picture he wanted. The helicopters dithered and dipped. Finally, he picked up one of the Steyr assault rifles and loosed a quick burst out the window in their general direction. The response was immediate - both machines reared up and fled downriver, presumably in search of a safe place to land.
The path ran on that way, he knew, grooving back down towards the water, building another rock wall at its landward side. They’d be able to come back that way, upriver, and stay hidden right to the edge of the cleared ground outside the lodge, mirror imaging the approach he’d made a couple of hours ago from the other side. He frowned a little, cuddled the folding frame stock of the Steyr into his shoulder, squinted along the sight and panned experimentally across the cleared ground. He was pretty sure he could knock down anyone coming for the house before they’d made a couple of metres in the open. They might try a rush assault but it wasn’t likely - they didn’t know how many were in the house, or what they might have done with Greta Jurgens, whether she was alive or dead, safe in her womb or dragged downstairs ready to be held up rag-doll limp as a shield.
And the lodge was a tough nut to crack. Ferrer had been clear about that much. Bitch got a fucking fortress there, man. Right into the fucking rock, no way you can come down from above, smooth sides so you can’t sneak up. I mean - he sat back, hands in the pockets of his clean new chinos, smirking and confident now he’d done his deal - who the fuck she expecting man, the fucking army? And all so she can fucking sleep? Man, I don’t know what hold that bitch got on Manco’s balls, but it’s gotta be something pretty fucking major, get him doing all this. Gotta give the mother of all blowjobs or someth
ing.
Like Stéphane Névant before him, Suerte saw the results and jumped to the obvious wrong conclusion. Onbekend stayed in the shadows. If you didn’t know he was there already, you looked for other, more visible explanations.
Like unhuman monsters, home from Mars.
It was the dynamic Ortiz had built his whole cover-up effort around. A monster stalks us! All hands to the palisades and the torches! Don’t ask, don’t ever ask who’s really making all this happen.
A head poked up from down near the river. Carl let him have a good look around, then fired off another burst. Stone chips and dust leapt in the air, the head jerked back down.
Just so they’re clear on the situation.
‘Marsalis?’
Manco Bambaren’s voice. Carl got his back to the side of the window space, stayed in the shadows and edged an eye around. Steep early afternoon sunlight flooded down into the canyon. If you crouched and peered upward, you could just see the rich angled fall of it past the rim, and a restful blue gloom beneath where the higher parts of the valley wall were cast in shadow. It was very quiet now the helicopters were gone - the whirring scrape of crickets, and the buzzing of flies on the bodies outside.
‘Black man, is that you?’
‘Good guess,’ he shouted back, dumping Bambaren’s Spanish for Quechua. ‘What do you want?’
Brief hesitation. Carl wondered if Onbekend maybe couldn’t follow a conversation in Quechua - there was no guarantee he’d have learnt it in his time living hidden up on the altiplano. He’d get by easily enough with Spanish and English. And as Bambaren’s pet pistaco, he’d have no need to integrate with the locals. Standard thirteen isolation would work like a dream.
Sure enough, Bambaren stayed in Spanish. ‘It’s really about what you want, Marsalis. Can we talk?’
‘Sure. Come on in.’
‘You guarantee not to shoot me before you’ve heard what I have to say?’
The Complete SF Collection Page 269