Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “Sit down please, Mr. Marsalis.” Norton was looking past him at Garcia and the other CO. His expression had turned cold. He took a phone from his jacket pocket, thumbed it, put it to his ear. “Hello. Yes, this is Tom Norton, could you put me through to the warden. Thank you.”

  Brief pause. Carl took the seat. The table held a slim black dataslate, cracked open at a discreet angle. No logo, an ultimate in brand statements. Marstech. Hardcopy lay around, unfamiliar forms. Carl scanned upside-down text—the word release leapt out and kicked him in the heart. Norton offered him a small, distracted smile.

  “Hello, Warden Parris. Yes, I need your help here. No, nothing serious. I’m just having a little difficulty with one of your men over procedure. Could you. Ah, thank you, that would be ideal.” He held out the phone to Garcia. “The warden would like to talk to you.”

  Garcia took the phone as if it might bite him, held it gingerly to his ear. You couldn’t hear what Parris said to him—it was a good phone, and the projection cone was tight. But his face flushed as he listened. His eyes switched from Carl to Norton and back like they were two parts of a puzzle that didn’t fit. He tried to say Yes, but a couple of times, jarred to a halt on each attempt. Parris, it was clear, wasn’t in the mood for debate. When Garcia finally got to speak, it was a clenched Yes, sir, and he lowered the phone immediately after. Norton held out a hand for it and Garcia, still flushing, slung it under the other man’s reach onto the surface of the table. It made almost no sound on impact, slid a bare five centimeters from where it landed. A very good phone, then. Garcia glared at it, perplexed maybe by his failure to skid the thing off the edge of the table onto the floor. Norton picked the little sliver of hardware up and stowed it.

  “Thank you.”

  Garcia stood there for a moment, wordless, staring at Norton. The other CO murmured something to him, put a hand on his arm, was propelling him out when Garcia shook off the grip and stabbed a finger at Carl.

  “This man is dangerous,” he said tightly. “If you can’t see that, then you deserve everything you get.”

  The other CO ushered him out and closed the door.

  Norton gave it a moment, then seated himself adjacent to Carl. Pale blue eyes leveled across the space. The smile was gone.

  “So,” Norton said. “Are you dangerous, Mr. Marsalis?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  A shrug. “In point of fact, no one. It was rhetorical. We’ve accessed your records. You are, let’s say, quite sufficiently dangerous for our purposes. But I’m interested to know what your perceptions are on the subject.”

  Carl stared at him. “Have you ever done time?”

  “Happily, no. But even if I had, I doubt it would approximate your experiences here. I’m not a citizen of the Confederated Republic.”

  Light trace of contempt in the last two words. Carl hazarded a guess.

  “You’re Canadian?”

  The corner of Norton’s mouth quirked. “North Atlantic Union. I’m here, Mr. Marsalis, at the behest of the Western Nations Colony Initiative. We would like to offer you a job.”

  CHAPTER 12

  As soon as he walked through the door, Sevgi knew she was in trouble.

  It was there in the looseness as he moved, in the balance of stance as he paused behind the chair, in the way he hooked it out and sat down. It smoked off the body beneath the shapeless blue prison coveralls like music cutting through radio interference. It looked back at her through his eyes as he settled into the chair, and it soaked out through the powerful quiet he’d carried into the room with him. It wasn’t Ethan—Marsalis had skin far darker than Ethan’s, and there was no real similarity in the features. Ethan had been stockier, too, heavier-muscled.

  Ethan had died younger.

  It didn’t matter. It was there just the same.

  Thirteen.

  “Mr. Marsalis?”

  He nodded. Waited.

  “I’m Sevgi Ertekin, COLIN Security. You’ve already met my partner, Tom Norton. There are a number of things we need to clarify before—”

  “I’ll do it.” His voice was deep and modulated. The English accent tripped her.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Whatever it is you need me to do. I’ll do it. At cost. I already told your partner. I’ll take the job in return for unconditional immunity to all charges pending against me, immediate release from Republican custody, and any expenses I’m likely to incur while I’m doing your dirty work.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “That’s quite an assumption you’re making there, Mr. Marsalis.”

  “Is it?” He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not known for my flower arranging. But let’s see if I’m assuming wrong, shall we? At a guess you want someone tracked down. Someone like me. That’s fine, that’s what I do. The only part I’m unclear on is if you want me to bring him in alive or not.”

  “We are not assassins, Mr. Marsalis.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  She felt the old anger flare. “You’re proud of that, are you?”

  “You’re upset by it?”

  She looked down at the unfolded dataslate and the text printed there. “In Peru, you shot an unarmed and injured woman in the back of the head. You executed her. Are you proud of that, too?”

  Long pause. She picked up his stare and held it. For a moment, she thought he would get up and walk out. Half of her, she realized, hoped he would.

  Instead, he switched his gaze abruptly to one of the high-placed windows in the waiting room. A small smile touched his lips. Went away. He cleared his throat.

  “Ms. Ertekin, do you know what a Haag gun is?”

  “I’ve read about them.” In NYPD communiqués, urging City Hall to issue tighter gun control guidelines before the new threat hit the streets. Scary enough that the initiatives passed almost without dispute. “It’s a bioload weapon.”

  “It’s a little more than that, actually.” He opened his right hand loosely, tipped his head to look at it as if he could see the gun weighed there in the cup of his palm. “It’s a delivery system for an engineered immune deficiency viral complex called Falwell Seven. There are other loads, but they don’t get a lot of use. Falwell is virulent, and very unpleasant. There is no cure. Have you ever watched someone die from a collapsed immune system, Ms. Ertekin?”

  In fact, she had. Nalan, a cousin from Hakkari, a onetime party girl in the frontier bases where Turkey did its proud European duty and buffered the mess farther east. Something she caught from a UN soldier. Nalan’s family, who prided themselves on their righteousness, threw her out. Sevgi’s father spat and found a way to bring her to New York, where he had clout in one of the new Midtown research clinics. Relations with family in Turkey, already strained, snapped for good. He never spoke to his brother again. Sevgi, only fourteen at the time, went with him to meet a sallow, big-eyed girl at the airport, older than her by what seemed like a gulf of years but reassuringly unversed in urban teen sophistication. She still remembered the look on Nalan’s face when they all went into the Skill-man Avenue mosque through the same door.

  Murat Ertekin did everything he could. He enrolled Nalan in experimental treatment lists at the hospital, fed her vitamin supplements and tracker anti-virals at home. He painted the spare room for her, sun-bright and green like the park. He prayed, five times a day for the first time in years. Finally, he wept.

  Nalan died anyway.

  Sevgi blinked away the memory; fever-stained sheets and pleading, hollow eyes.

  “You’re saying you did this woman a favor?”

  “I’m saying I got her quickly and painlessly where she was going anyway.”

  “Don’t you think that should have been her choice?”

  He shrugged. “She made her choice when she tried to jump me.”

  If she’d doubted what he was at all, she no longer did. It was the same unshakable calm she’d seen in Ethan, and the same psychic bulk. He sat in the chair like something carved out of black stone, watchi
ng her. She felt something tiny shift in her chest.

  She tapped a key on the dataslate. A new page slid up on the display.

  “You were recently involved in prison violence. A fight in the F wing shower block. Four men hospitalized. Three of them by you.”

  Pause. Silence.

  “You want to tell me your side of that?”

  He stirred. “I would think the details speak for themselves. Three white men, one black man. It was an Aryan Command punishment beating.”

  “Which prison staff did nothing to prevent?”

  “Surveillance in the showers can be compromised by steamy conditions. Quote unquote.” His lip curled fractionally. “Or soap jammed over lenses. Response time can be delayed. By extraneous factors, quote unquote.”

  “So you felt moved to intervene.” She groped around for motivations that would have fit Ethan. “This Reginald Barnes, he was a friend of yours?”

  “No. He was a piece-of-shit wirehead snitch. He had it coming. But I didn’t know that at the time.”

  “Was he genetically modified?”

  Marsalis smirked. “Not unless there’s some project somewhere I haven’t heard of for turning out brainless addictive-personality fuckups.”

  “You felt solidarity because of his color, then?”

  The smirk wiped away, became a frown. “I felt I didn’t want to see him arse-fucked with a power drill. I think that’s probably a color-neutral preference, don’t you?”

  Sevgi held on to her temper. This wasn’t going well. She was gritty with the syn comedown—no synaptic modifiers permitted in Jesusland, they’d taken them off her at the airport—and still fuming from the argument she’d lost with Norton in New York.

  I’m serious, Sev. The policy board’s all over this thing now. We’ve got Ortiz and Roth coming down to section two, three times a week—

  In the flesh? What an honor.

  They’re looking for progress reports, Sev. Which means reports of progress, and right now we don’t have any. If we don’t do something that looks like fresh action, Nicholson is going to land on us with both feet. Now, I’ll survive that. Will you?

  She knew she wouldn’t.

  October. Back in New York, the trees in Central Park were starting to rust and stain yellow. Under her window as she got ready for work each day, the market traders went wrapped against the early-morning chill. The summer had turned, tilted about like a jetliner in the clear blue sky above the city, sunlight sliding cold and glinting off its wings. The warmth wasn’t gone yet, but it was fading fast. South Florida felt like clinging.

  “How much has Norton told you?”

  “Not much. That you have a problem UNGLA won’t help you with. He didn’t say why, but I’m guessing it’s Munich-related.” A sudden, unexpected grin that dropped about a decade off his seamed features. “You guys really should have signed up to the Accords like everybody else.”

  “COLIN approved the draft in principle,” said Sevgi, feeling unreasonably defensive.

  “Yeah. All about that principle, wasn’t it. Principally: you don’t tell us what to do, you globalist bureaucrat scum.”

  Since he wasn’t far wrong, she didn’t argue the point. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  “No. I’m freelance. My loyalties are strictly for sale. Like I already said, just tell me what you want me to do.”

  She hesitated a moment. The dataslate had an integral resonance scrambler built to COLIN specs, which made it tighter than anything any lawyer had ever carried into an interview room at South Florida State. And Marsalis was pretty clearly desperate for an out. Still, the habit of the past four months was ingrained.

  “We have,” she said finally, “a renegade thirteen on our hands. He’s been loose since June. Killing.”

  He grunted. No visible surprise. “Where’d he get out of? Cimarron? Tanana?”

  “No. He got out of Mars.”

  This time she had him. He sat up.

  “This is a completely confidential matter, Mr. Marsalis. You need to understand that before we start. The murders are widely distributed, and varied in technique. No official connection has been made among them, and we want it to stay that way.”

  “Yeah, I bet you do. How’d he get past the nanorack security?”

  “He didn’t. He shorted out the docking run and crashed the vessel into the Pacific. By the time we got there, he was gone.”

  Marsalis pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. “Now, there’s an idea.”

  She let the rest out. Anything to take the smug, competent control off his face. “Before that, he had systematically mutilated the other eleven cryocapped crewmembers in order to feed himself. He amputated their limbs and kept them alive in suspension, then, finally, began to kill them and strip the rest of their bodies for meat.”

  A nod. “How long was transit?”

  “Thirty-three weeks. You don’t seem surprised by any of this.”

  “That’s because I’m not. You’re stuck out there, you’ve got to eat something.”

  “Did you ever think that?”

  Something like a shadow passed across his eyes. His voice came out just short of even. “Is that how you found me? Cross-reference?”

  “Something like that.” She chose not to mention Norton’s sudden enthusiasm for the new tactic. “Our profiling n-djinn cited you as the only other thirteen known to have experienced similar circumstances.”

  Marsalis offered her a thin smile. “I never ate anybody.”

  “No. But did you think about it?”

  He was silent for a while. She was on the point of asking her question again when he got up from the seat and went to stand by the high window. He stared out at the sky.

  “It crossed my mind a few times,” he said quietly. “I knew the recovery ship was coming, but I had the best part of two months to worry about it. You can’t help running the scenarios in your mind. What if they don’t make it, what if something crazy happens? What if—”

  He stopped. His gaze unhooked from the cloud cover and came back to the room, back to her face.

  “Was he out there the whole thirty-three weeks?”

  “Most of it. From what we can tell, his cryocap spat him out about two weeks into the trajectory.”

  “And Mars Control didn’t fetch him back?”

  “Mars Control didn’t know about it.” Sevgi gestured. “The n-djinn went down, looks like it was tricked out. The ship fell back on automated systems. Silent running. He woke up right after.”

  “That’s a nice little cluster of coincidence.”

  “Isn’t it.”

  “But not very convenient from a culinary point of view.”

  “No. We’re assuming the cryocap timing was an error. Whoever spiked the n-djinn probably planned to have the system bring him up a couple of weeks out from Earth. Something in the intrusion program flipped when it should have flopped, and you wake up two weeks out from Mars instead. Our friend arrives starved and pissed off and probably not very sane.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  Sevgi nodded. She hit the keypad again and pushed the dataslate around so they could both see the screen and the face it held. Marsalis left the window and propped himself in casual angles on the edge of the table. Light gleamed off the side of his skull.

  “Allen Merrin. We recovered trace genetic material from Horkan’s Pride, the vessel he crashed, and ran it through COLIN’s thirteen database. This is what they came up with.”

  It was almost imperceptible, the way he grew focused, the way the casual poise tautened into something else. She watched his eyes sweep the text alongside the pale head-and-shoulders photo. She could have recited it to him from memory.

  Merrin, Allen (sin 48523dx3814)

  Delivered (c/s) April 26, 2064, Taos, New Mexico (Project Lawman). Uteral host, Bilikisu Sankare, source genetic material, Isaac Hubscher, Isabela Gayoso (sins appended). All genetic code variants property of Elleniss Hall, Inc., patents asserted (Elleni
ss Hall & US Army Partnership 2029).

  Initial conditioning & training Taos, New Mexico, specialist skills development Fort Benning, Georgia (covert ops, counterinsurgency). Deployed: Indonesia 2083, Arabian peninsula 2084—5, Tajikistan 2085—7 & 2089, Argentina, Bolivia 2088, Rim Authority (urban pacification program) 2090—1.

  Retired 2092 (under 2nd UNGLA Convention Accords, Jacobsen Protocol). Accepted Mars resettlement 2094 (COLIN citizenship record appended).

  “Very Christ-like.”

  She blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  “The face.” He tapped the screen with a fingernail. The LCLS glow rippled around the touch. Merrin stared up under the tiny distortions. “Very Faith Satellite Channel. Looks like that Man Taking Names anime they did for the Cash memorial.”

  The smile slipped out before she could stop it. His mouth quirked response. He moved the chair a little, sat down again.

  “Saw that, did you? We get the reruns in here all the time. Faith-based rehab, you know.”

  Quit grinning at him like a fucking news ’face, Sev. Get a grip.

  “You don’t recognize him, then?”

  A curious, tilted look. “Why would I?”

  “You were in Iran.”

  “Wasn’t everybody.” When she just waited, he sighed. “Yeah, we heard about the Lawmen. Saw them at a distance a few times in Iran, down around Ahvaz. But from what you’ve got there, it doesn’t look like this Merrin ever got up that far north.”

  “He could have.” Sevgi nodded toward the screen. “I’ll be honest with you, this is a pretty loose summary. Once you get into the mission records, it’s a whole lot less defined. Covert deployments, so-called lost documentation, rumor and hearsay, subject is understood to have, that sort of shit. Executive denial and cover-ups around practically every corner. Plus, you’ve got a whole fucking hero mythology going on around this guy. I’ve seen data that puts Merrin in combat zones hundreds of kilometers apart on the same day, eyewitness accounts that say he took wounds we can’t find any medical records to confirm, some of them wounds he couldn’t possibly have survived if the stories are true. Even that South American deployment has too much overlap to be wholly accurate. He was in Tajikistan, no he wasn’t, he was still in Bolivia; he was solo-deployed, no, he was leading a Lawman platoon in Kuwait City.” Her disgust bubbled over. “I’m telling you, the guy’s a fucking ghost.”