Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “All right. Cranston?”

  The ’face shaded undramatically into being across the room from them, like a pre-millennial photo Sevgi had once seen developed chemically at a seminar.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Sevgi got up and gestured. “Can you run the crime event model for us? Last few minutes only.”

  “No problem. You’ll need to come through to the front room; that’s where it seems to have started. I’ll engage the system now. Do you want sound?”

  Sevgi, who’d watched a lot of this sort of thing, shook her head.

  “No, just the motions.”

  “Then if you’ll follow me.”

  Unnervingly, the patrolman stepped directly through the wall. They left the body and took the more conventional route through the connecting door to the front room, where Cranston was waiting. As they came in, the sky outside the room’s window darkened abruptly to night and the drapes drew themselves partway closed like some cheap horror-flick effect. An unharmed edition of Toni Montes stood in for the ghost—she shaded back to life in the center of the room, feet still shod in mint-and-cream espadrilles that picked up the colors in her skirt and blouse. Her makeup was intact, and she looked impossibly composed.

  A pace away from her, the system penciled in the perpetrator.

  It was a black outline of a man, a figure with the smooth, characterless features and standardized body mass of an anatomical sketch, all done in shiny jet. But it breathed, and it swayed slightly, and it sprang at Toni Montes and hit her with a savage, looping backfist. The image of the woman flew silently backward, tripped, and fell on the couch. One espadrille came off, flipped ludicrously high, and landed on the other side of the room. The black figure went after Montes, seized her by the throat, and punched her in the face. She flopped and slumped. The other espadrille came off. She pushed herself away along the couch, stumbled toward upright while the black figure stood and watched with robot calm. When Montes got to her feet, it stepped in again and punched her high in the chest. She flew back into the drapes, rolled, staggered upright. She flailed with nails, got a backhand for her trouble that knocked her fully across the room. The edge of the opened door to the hall caught her in the back. This time she went down and stayed down.

  The black figure stalked after her.

  “At this point,” said the ’face, “the model estimates the killer force-marched Montes into the other room, threw her back against the wall, and shot her through the head. Reasons for the change of tactic are still under consideration. It may be that he was concerned the killing would be seen through the window to the street.”

  The black figure bent over Montes and hauled her to her feet by the hair. It pinioned her arm into the small of her back and shoved her, struggling, toward the connecting door to the dining room. At the threshold, the two figures froze in tableau.

  “Would you like to relocate to view the final sequence?”

  Sevgi glanced at Marsalis. He shook his head. “No. Turn it off.”

  Montes and her black cutout killer blurred and vanished. Marsalis walked through the space where they’d been, leaving Sevgi in the front room. When she followed, she found him knelt once more by the corpse, apparently reading the scroll-ups.

  “See something you like?” It was an old homicide joke, crime scene black humor. It was out of her mouth before she realized she’d said it.

  He looked up and seemed to be scanning the room. “I’m going to need to see prior record.”

  She blinked at him. “Prior record of what?”

  “Her prior record.” He indicated the sprawled corpse. “Montes.”

  “Marsalis, she was a fucking housewife.” Angry, she realized, with herself and the ease with which she’d slid back into crime scene macabre. She brought her voice down. “This is a suburban mother of two who sold real estate part-time. What record are you talking about?”

  He hesitated. Got up and stared around the room again, as if he couldn’t work out how Montes had come to be living with this décor.

  “Marsalis?”

  He faced her. “If this woman was a real estate saleswoman, I’m a fucking bonobo. You want to get some air?”

  She cranked an eyebrow. “In a virtuality?”

  “Figure of speech. There’s got to be a briefing level somewhere in this format. How about we go there?”

  The briefing level was cut-rate, a mesa top that you got to from anywhere in the construct by reciting a key code Cranston provided them with. The system switched without any transition you could feel to a viewpoint high up over the desert and the spread of datahomes on the plain below. Over time, it appeared various AFPD detectives had imported their own custom touches, and now the mesa top was littered with favorite armchairs in clashing upholstery, a couple of tatami mats, a hammock strung on two thick steel hooks embedded, startlingly, in floating patches of brickwork, another slung more conventionally between two full-size palm trees, a pool table, and, for some inexplicable reason, a tipped-over antique motorcycle with an ax buried in its fuel tank.

  It was very quiet up there, just the wind catching on edges of rock in the cliff face below. Quiet enough that you thought if you listened carefully, you might be able to hear the faint static hiss of the base datasystems turning over. Carl stared down at the adobe structures for a while, not listening for anything, thinking it over. The datahomes seemed very distant, and he supposed that was appropriate. There was nothing here he needed to interest himself in more than superficially. He wondered how much to bother telling Ertekin, how much cooperation he needed to fake to keep her cop instincts cooled.

  “Look,” he said finally. “That fight they’ve modeled down there is bullshit. Montes wasn’t a victim, she fought this guy all the way. She knew how to fight. That’s why the slippers came off. She didn’t lose them in the battering, she kicked them off so she could fight better.”

  “And you’re basing this on what?”

  “Initially, instinct.” He held up a hand to forestall her protest. “Ertekin, this isn’t some fucked-in-the-head serial killer we’re talking about. Merrin came all the way to the Freeport just to kill this woman. That has to make her something special.”

  “Maybe so. But it doesn’t make her a combat specialist.”

  “No. But her hands do.” He raised both his own hands now, palms toward his face, fingers loosely curled, halfway to a double fist guard. “There’s bone alloy marbling across the knuckles, you can feel it under the skin. Probably calcicrete. That’s combat tech.”

  “Or part of a menopausal support regime.”

  “At forty-four?”

  Ertekin shook her head stubbornly. “I looked through the file last night. There’s nothing about combat training there. And anyway, it doesn’t gel with the genetic trace material under her fingernails. You really think a combat pro would bother scratching her attacker?”

  “No. I think she did that when she’d already given up. When she’d already made the decision to let him kill her.”

  “Why would…”

  He saw the way it dawned on her, the way her brow smoothed out and the heavy-lidded eyes widened slightly. In the Arizona construct sunlight, he realized suddenly that they were irised in flecked amber.

  “She knew we’d find it,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He looked somberly down at the datahomes again. “Toni here was gathering evidence for us. Just think about that for a moment. This is a woman who knows she’s about to die. A minute or less off her own death, she’s calculating how to take this guy down posthumously. Now, that is either psychotic force of will, or training. Or a bit of both.”

  They both stood in silence for a while. He glanced at her again and saw how the wind twitched her hair around the lines of her jaw. Tiny motion, barely there at all, but something about it set off an itching in the pit of his stomach. She must have felt some of it, too, because she turned and caught him looking. He got the full sunlit force of the tiger eyes for a moment, then
she looked hurriedly away.

  “Gene analysis says no enhancement,” she said. “Standard chromosome set, twenty-three pairs, no anomalies.”

  “I didn’t say there would be.” He sighed. “That’s the fucking problem these days. Anything extraordinary shows up in anyone, we all go running to the augment catalog looking for correlation. Got to be something crammed into an Xtrasome, something fucking engineered. No one ever wonders if it might just be good old-fashioned heredity and formative conditioning.”

  “That’s because these days it mostly isn’t.”

  “Yeah, don’t fucking remind me. Anyone wins anything these days, they’re up there plugging some gene frame consortium as soon as the cameras roll.” Carl lifted his arms in acceptance-speech burlesque. “I’d just like to say I couldn’t have done it without the good people at Amino Solutions. They truly made me what I am today. Yeah, fuck off.”

  She was giving him an odd look, he knew.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Seems like an odd stance for you to be taking, that’s all.”

  “Oh, because I’m a thirteen I’ve got to like this pay-and-load excellence we’re all living with. Listen, Ertekin, they rolled the dice with me just like with you. No one dumped an artificial chromosome into me in vitro. I got twenty-three pairs, just like you, and what I am is written all over them. There’s no optional discard for shit like mine. No knockout sequencer in a hypo they can shoot me up with and make me safe to breed.”

  “In which case,” she said quietly, “I’d have thought you’d see the Xtrasomes as a step forward. For the next generation at least.”

  For a moment, he could feel the rolling weight of his own pointless anger, back and forth through his chest cavity like a punching bag left swinging. Images from the past four wasted months flickered jaggedly through his head.

  He put a clamp on it.

  “I’m a little short on that kind of outlook right now. But let’s stick with Montes, shall we? I’ll bet you this much: she’s got a combat history, at a minimum a combat training history. If it doesn’t show up in the prior record, then she hid it for some reason. She wouldn’t be the first person to wind up in the Angeline Freeport wearing a brand-new identity. Wouldn’t be the first person to marry someone who knows nothing about who she used to be, either, so you’re probably wasting your time talking to the husband.”

  “Yeah. Usually the way.”

  “How old were the kids?”

  “Four and seven.”

  “His?”

  “I don’t know.” Ertekin reached up and made a gesture that split the virtuality open. She tugged down a data scroll, gently glowing text written on the air like some angelic missive. She paged down with delicate middle-and ring-finger motions while the index finger kept the scroll open. “Yeah. First birth’s Republic-registered, looks like they moved to the Freeport shortly after. Second child was born there.”

  “So she’s from the Republic, too.”

  “Looks like it, yeah. You think that’s relevant?”

  “Might be.” Carl hesitated, trying to put the rest of it into words, the vague intimations he’d had while he watched the replay death of Toni Montes. “There’s something else. The children were the obvious leverage, the reason she let him kill her.”

  Ertekin made a gesture of distaste. “Yeah, so you said.”

  “Yeah, so the question has to be why did she believe him. He could have killed her and then still waited around and murdered the rest of her family. Why trust him to keep his word?”

  “You think a mother put in that situation has a choice? You think—”

  “Ertekin, she was making choices all the time. Remember the genetic trace under the nails? This isn’t a civilian we’re talking about, this is a competent woman making a series of very cold, very hard calculations. And one of those calculations was to trust the man who put a bullet through her head. Now, what does that say to you?”

  She grimaced. The words came reluctantly.

  “That she knew him.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. She knew him well. Well enough to know she could trust his word. Now, where does your suburban housewife mother of two part-time real estate saleslady make friends like that?”

  He went and sat in one of the hammocks while she thought about it.

  CHAPTER 16

  Norton was waiting for them when they surfaced.

  Sevgi blinked back to local awareness and saw him watching her through the glass panel on the couch cover. It felt a little like staring up at someone from underwater. She thumbed the release catch at her side, propped herself up on her elbows as the hood hinged up.

  “Any progress?” Her voice sounded dull in her own ears—hearing thickened with the residual hum of the soundproofing.

  Norton nodded. “Yes. Of the slow variety.”

  “Do we get to go home?”

  “Maybe tonight. Nicholson pulled in Roth and there’s a full-scale diplomatic war in the making.” He crimped a grin. “Roth is demanding a fully armed motorcade escort to Miami International, and fighter cover until we’re out of Republican airspace. Really wants to rub their faces in it.”

  “That’s our Andrea.” Sevgi hauled herself off the couch and upright, groggy from the time in virtual and lack of k37. Despite herself, she felt a flicker of warmth for Andrea Walker Roth and the arrayed might of COLIN’s diplomatic muscle. She didn’t really like the woman, not any more than the rest of the policy board; she knew Roth was, like all of them, first and foremost a power broker. But—

  But sometimes, Sev, it’s good to have the big battalions standing behind you.

  “Yeah, well, my guess is the real pressure’s coming from Ortiz.” Norton gestured at the other couch, where Carl Marsalis was just sitting up. “Secretary general nomination in the wind and all. He’s going to be full of UN-friendly gestures for the next eight months. Luck and a following wind, he could be your boss next year, Marsalis.”

  The black man grimaced. “Not my boss. I’m freelance, remember.”

  “Fact remains, he’s our best hope of not having to spend another night down here. There’s a lot of COLIN subcontracting in this state. Lot of sensitive business-community leaders who won’t want waves made. That’s the angle Ortiz will play while Roth goes down the wires to Washington.” Norton spread his hands, turned back mostly to Sevgi. “My guess is we’ll wait till nightfall. Just a case of sitting tight.”

  Marsalis got up off the couch and winced. He worked one shoulder around in circles.

  “Something the matter?” Sevgi asked.

  He looked at her for a moment as if gauging the level of genuine concern in her voice. “Yeah. Four months of substandard betamyeline chloride.”

  “Ah,” said Norton.

  Marsalis flexed his right arm experimentally, a climber’s stretch, palm to nape of neck, elbow up beside his head. He grimaced again. “Don’t suppose you’d have any around?”

  Norton shook his head. “It’s unlikely. Human traffic through Perez is down to a minimum these days. Not much call for mesh-related product. Can you hold on until we get to New York?”

  “I can hold on pretty much forever. I’d just rather not, if it’s all the same to you. It’s, uh, uncomfortable.”

  “We’ll get you some painkillers,” Sevgi promised. “You should have said something last night.”

  “It slipped my mind.”

  “Look, I’ll check with supplies anyway,” said Norton. “You never know. There might be some mothballed stock.”

  “Thank you.” Marsalis glanced between the two COLIN officers, then nodded toward the door of the v-chamber. “I’m going to go for a walk. Be on the beach if you need me.”

  Norton waited until he was gone.

  “Excuse me? If we need him? Is it just me or is he the one who needs something from us right now?”

  Sevgi held down an unexpected smile. “He’s a thirteen, Tom. What are you going to do?”

  “Well, not look very hard for hi
s betamyeline is what comes immediately to mind.”

  “He did say thank you.”

  “Yeah.” Norton nodded reluctantly. “He did.”

  He hesitated, and Sevgi could almost hear what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. She found herself, suddenly, inexplicably saying it for him. “Ethan, right?”

  “Look, I know you don’t like to—”

  She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter, Tom. I. You know, maybe I’m way too sensitive around certain topics. Maybe it’s time. Right? You were going to ask about Ethan? If he was like this?”

  Small pause. “Was he?”

  She sighed, testing the seals on her self-control. Breath a little shuddery, but otherwise fuck it, Sev, it’s four years gone, you need to…

  To what? Need what?

  You need…something, Sev. Some fucking thing, you need.

  Sigh again. Gesture at the door Marsalis just walked out of.

  “Ethan was a different man, Tom. Ethan wasn’t his gene code, he wasn’t just a jazzed-up area thirteen and a custom-wired limbic system. He—”

  Another helpless gesture.

  “Do I see similarities? Yeah. Did Ethan have the same hey-cut-my-fucking-throat-see-if-I-care attitude? Yeah. Did Ethan make any normal male in the room itch up the way Marsalis is making you itch up? Yeah. Does that—”

  “Sev, I’m not—”

  “You are, Tom.” She spread her hands, offered up the smile she’d repressed earlier. “You are. It’s how they built them, it’s what they’re for. And your reaction—that’s how they built you. It’s just that it took evolution a hundred thousand generations to put you together, and it took human science less than a century to build them. Faster systems management, that’s all.”

  “What’s that, a quote from the Project Lawman brochure?”

  Sevgi shook her head, kept the smile. “No. Just something Ethan used to say. Look, you asked me if Ethan and this guy are alike? How would I know? Ethan used to get up half an hour before me every morning and grind fresh coffee for us both. Would this guy do that? Who knows?”