Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  Ortiz spotted them and stacked his coffee casually on the roof of the limo at his side. As Carl approached, he stepped forward to meet him and stuck out his hand. No wince, no sign of the internal steeling Carl was used to when he made the clasp with someone who knew what he was. Instead, there was a loose grin on Ortiz’s lean bronzed face that shaved years off his otherwise sober demeanor.

  “Mr. Marsalis. Good to see you again. It’s been awhile, I don’t know if you’ll remember me from Brussels.”

  “Spring ’03.” Carl masked his surprise. “Yeah, I remember.”

  Ortiz made a wry face. “What a complete mess that was, eh? Two agendas, worlds apart and steaming steadily in opposite directions. Hard to believe we even bothered talking.”

  Carl shrugged. “Talking’s always the easy part. Looks good, doesn’t cost anything.”

  “Yes, very true.” Ortiz shifted focus with the polished smoothness of the career politician. “Ms. Ertekin. I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion. Tom Norton told me you’d be coming in, but I felt in view of the. Unpleasantness, it might be as well to provide an escort. And since I was on my way across town anyway…”

  You thought you’d swing the opportunity to curry some potential UN favor. Right. Or maybe just gawk at the thirteen.

  But underneath the sneer, Carl found himself unable to summon much dislike for Ortiz. Maybe it was the relaxed handshake and the grin, maybe just the contrast with the past four months down in the Republic. He turned to catch Ertekin’s response, see what he could read in her face. The tiger eyes and—

  —something invisible splits the air between them.

  Carl was moving before he had time to consciously understand why.

  —flicker of black motion in the corner of his eye—

  He hit Ertekin with crossed arms, bore her to the pavement and crushed her there. One hand groping for a weapon he didn’t have. Over his head, the air in the street erupted in spit-hiss fury.

  Magfire.

  He heard the coachwork on the limo go first, riddled from end to end—it sounded like a spate of sudden, heavy rain. Someone yelled, grunted as they were hit. Bodies tumbled behind him, dimly sensed. Screams. He was smearing himself on top of Ertekin, casting about for the—

  There.

  Out of the market, the pitch and panic of the surrounding multitude, three crouched, black-clad forms, and the sashaying gait of skaters. They hugged the stubby electromag spray guns to their bellies, cradled low in both hands as they surfed the crowd. Shoulder work opened their path—Carl saw bystanders shunted aside and sprawling. The mesh made it seem like slow motion. Chloride clarity gave him the lead skater, stance shifting as he lifted the muzzle of the spray gun, eyes wide in the pale skin gap of the black ski mask. Half a dozen meters at most, he was going to make sure of his shot this time.

  Carl locked gazes and came up off the floor snarling.

  Later, he’d never know if it was the matched stare, the noise he made, or just the mesh-assisted speed that saved his life. Maybe there was the edge of a flinch in the man’s face as he hurtled forward; the ski mask made it hard to tell. By then Carl was already up and on him. Three—count them, one! two! three!—sprinted steps and a whirl of tanindo technique. The blade of his left hand slammed in under the lead skater’s chin; his right just added lift and vectored spin. The two of them went over together in a tangle of limbs. The spray gun dropped and skittered. Carl got on top of the skater and started hitting him in the face and throat.

  The other two were sharp. The right wing leapt cleanly over the tumbled bodies in his path, came down tight with a solid plastic smack, and kept going. Carl got a confused glimpse of the landing, too busy killing the lead skater to pay real attention. But he felt the other wingman fuck up the same maneuver and catch one skate on Carl’s raised shoulder as he jumped. The black-clad form went headlong, almost graceful, hit and rolled on the pavement. Controlled impact, he’d be back up any second. The mesh strung moments apart like loops of cabling. Carl hacked down savagely with an elbow one more time and beneath him the lead skater went abruptly limp. As the tumbled wingman got almost back upright, Carl lunged, grabbed up the leader’s electromag, clumsily, left-handed, squirmed sideways, getting line of fire, and emptied the gun.

  The magload sounded like seething water as it left the gun. No recoil—thank Christ—and pretty much point-blank. Carl lay, awkwardly braced, and watched the slugs rip into their target. The wing skater seemed to trip forward again, but jerkily this time, no grace in it. He collapsed facedown, twisted once, and didn’t move again.

  The electromag’s feed mechanism coughed empty and stopped.

  Sound filtered through: voices raised and hysterical weeping. Still frosted into the mesh, Carl heard it as if through a long pipe. He picked himself up warily, still not convinced at a cellular level that the third skater wasn’t coming back. He dropped the empty weapon, walked to the dead wingman. Crouched beside the body and tugged the man’s spray gun free. He checked the load, almost absently, on autopilot now, and surveyed the damage around him.

  The limo was a write-off, coachwork pockmarked gray on black with the raking impact of the magfire. The windows were punched through in a couple of dozen places, powdered to white opaque in spiderweb lines around each hole. Incredibly, Ortiz’s coffee stood where he’d parked it, intact and steaming quietly on the roof of the limo. But Ortiz and his security were both down, tangled in each other’s arms and motionless—it looked as if the bodyguard had tried to get his boss to the ground and cover him there. Blood pooling on the molded pavement where they lay suggested he’d failed. Other bodies lay at a distance, shoppers and stall traders caught in the magfire. Ertekin was up on her knees, staring dazedly around at the mess. Her olive skin was smeared sallow with shock.

  “Got two of them,” said Carl thickly as he helped her to her feet. “Third one was too fast leaving. Sorry.”

  She just stared at him.

  “Ertekin.” He flickered fingers in front of her face. “Are you injured? Are you hurt? Talk to me, Ertekin.”

  She shook herself. Pushed his hand away.

  “Fine.” It was a bare croak. She cleared her throat. “I’m fine. We’d better get. An ambulance. Get these people…”

  She shook herself again.

  “Who? Did you see…?”

  “No.” Carl stared away in the direction the last skater had disappeared. He could feel a decision stealing over him like ice. “No, I didn’t. But right after the meat van gets here, I think you’d better take me in to COLIN so we can start work and find out.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Sevgi was still shaking when the cops showed up. She felt an odd shame when the detective in charge, a lean dark man with hard bones in his face, finished talking with patrol and made his way across to her. He was bound to notice. Wrapped in an insulene recovery shawl, seated in the open rear door of the murdered limo and watching CSI go about their business, she felt drenched in her civilian status.

  “Ms. Ertekin?”

  She looked up bleakly. “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “Detective Williamson.” He flipped his left palm open. The NYPD holo twisted to blue-and-gold life, glistened at her like lost treasure. “I’d like to ask you some questions, if you’re feeling up to it.”

  “I’m fine.” She’d taken the syn that morning, in the shower, but it wouldn’t have kicked in yet even on an empty stomach. She groped after conventional resources, pulled herself together with a shiver. “I used to be on the force, I’m fine.”

  “That so?” Polite, speculative. Williamson didn’t want to be her buddy. She could guess why.

  “Yeah, eleven years. Queens, then Midtown Homicide.” She managed a shaky smile. “You guys are from the Twenty-eighth, right? Larry Kasabian still attached there?”

  “Yeah, Kasabian’s still around, I think.” No warmth in the words. He nodded at Marsalis, who sat starkly on the steps of the building in his South Florida State inmate jacket, watching t
he crime scene squad go about their business as if they were a stage play put on for his benefit. “Patrol says you told them this guy’s a thirteen.”

  “Yes.” She was cursing herself for it now. “He is.”

  “And.” Brief hesitation. “Is that filed with anyone here in the city?”

  Sevgi sighed. “We got in late last night. He’s a technical consultant for COLIN Security, but we haven’t had time to notify anybody yet.”

  “All right.” But it clearly wasn’t all right. Williamson’s expression stayed cool. “I’m not going to pursue that, but you need to get him registered. Today. Is he, uh, staying with you?”

  The implication sneered beneath the words. It felt like a slap. It felt like her father’s tirade when he found out about Ethan. Sevgi felt her own expression tighten.

  “No, he’s not uh, staying with me,” she parodied. “He’s uh, staying in COLIN-account accommodation, just as soon as we can find him some. So do you think we can maybe just shelve the fucking Jesusland paranoia. And maybe get on with the police work at hand? How’d that be?”

  Williamson’s eyes flared.

  “That’d be just fine, Ms. Ertekin,” he said evenly. “The police work at hand is that this twist just killed two armed men in broad daylight, empty-handed, and he doesn’t appear to have a scratch on him. Now, maybe this is just my paranoia running away with me, or maybe it’s just good old-fashioned cop instinct, but something about that doesn’t chime in time.”

  “He’s carrying a Mars environment systemic biohoist. And he was combat-trained from age seven up.”

  Williamson grunted. “Yeah, I heard that about them. Bad to the bone, right? And you don’t think the men he killed here were combat-proficient.”

  “You do?” Sevgi rapped her knuckles on the slug-riddled coachwork at her side. “Come on, Williamson, look at this shit. Combat-proficient? No, they just had guns.”

  “Any reason you can think of that someone would send a low-grade spray-for-pay crew after a COLIN executive?”

  She shook her head wordlessly. They weren’t after Ortiz, she knew inside. Ortiz just got in the way. They were here to kill Marsalis. Kill him before he gets any kind of handle on Merrin.

  No reason to share that with Detective Williamson right now.

  “And you told patrol you didn’t see the actual fight at all?”

  She shook her head again, more definitely this time, getting traction. “No, I said I didn’t see much of it. Much of anything, I was on the ground—”

  “Where he threw you, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” The weight of his body on hers. “He probably saved my life.”

  “So he saw them coming?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

  Williamson nodded. “I’ll get around to it. Right now, I’m asking you.”

  “And I told you I don’t know.”

  There was a compressed pause. Williamson started again. “In the statement, you say you think there were three attackers. Or is that just what your twist friend over there told you?”

  “No. I saw one take off toward the boulevard.” She indicated the shrink-wrapped corpses of the men Marsalis had killed. The black skater rig was clearly visible through the plastic. “And I can count.”

  “Description?”

  She looked up at him for a long moment. “Black-clad. Wearing a ski mask.”

  Williamson sighed. “Yeah. Okay. You want to tell me about this other guy?”

  He gestured at the third bundle on the pavement. The pale, blood-speckled face of Ortiz’s bodyguard gaped up wide-eyed through the plastic. They’d had to roll him onto his back to get Ortiz out from under and onto the wagon, and that was how CSI had wrapped him.

  Sevgi shrugged.

  “Security.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No. Not my section.” It dawned abruptly on Sevgi why Williamson was so edgy. In theory, NYPD held the ground here, but under the Colony Initiative Act, she could take it from them pretty much at will. The sudden sense of the power she had gusted through her like insects in her belly. It wasn’t a clean feeling.

  Williamson moved a couple of paces to stand over the dead bodyguard. He stared down at the man’s face. “So this guy covers Ortiz, right?”

  “Yes, apparently.”

  “Yeah, that’s his job. And our twist friend over there—”

  “Do you want to stop using that fucking word?”

  It got her a speculative look. The detective came back toward the limo. “All right. Security covers Ortiz. Your genetically modified friend over there covers you. You got any idea at all why he might have done that?”

  Sevgi shook her head wearily. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Yeah, I will. But thirteens aren’t known for their honesty.” Williamson paused deliberately. “Or their self-sacrifice. Had to be something in it for him.”

  She glared back at the detective, and maybe it was the syn coming on now, but she thought she could have blown Williamson’s head off if she had a weapon at hand. Instead she levered herself to her feet and faced him. “I’m done talking to you, Detective.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “I said I’m done talking to you.” No maybe about it, it was the syn. The anger drove her forward, but it was the drug that gave her the poise. Williamson was a head taller than she was, but she stood in his personal space as if she wore body armor. As if the last forty minutes hadn’t happened to her. The insulene shawl was puddled around her feet. “Someone a little less fucking Neanderthal, I’d be happy to liaise with. You, I’m done wasting time on.”

  “This is a murder investi—”

  “Yeah, right now that’s what it is. You want to see how fast I can turn it into a COLIN Security operation?”

  His jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

  “You back off, Detective, leave me the fuck alone, and you can keep your investigation. Otherwise I’m going to pull the COLIN act on you, and you can go back and tell them at the Twenty-eighth they’ll be losing their jurisdiction.”

  Behind the syn, there was a tiny trickle of guilt as she watched Williamson crumble, an empathy from her own years on the other side of the fence.

  She crushed it. Crossed the street to Marsalis.

  COLIN arrived in modest force about ten minutes later. A secure transit Land Rover rolled quietly into the marketplace, parting the crowds with a low-intensity subsonic dispersal pulse that set Sevgi’s teeth on edge even at distance. She hadn’t called Norton, so someone must have authorized the roll-out when the news about Ortiz broke. The police had been holding back accredited film crews and solo shoulderscope artists in the crowd for a while, and it would be all over the feeds by now.

  The Land Rover came to a halt at the edge of the crime scene, with scant regard for the incident barriers the NYPD had strung. One armor-swollen corner of its bodywork broke the bright yellow beams and set off the alarm. Police uniforms came running.

  “Subtle,” said Marsalis.

  The Land Rover’s forward passenger door cracked, swung open at a narrow angle. Tom Norton stood up on the running board behind it, scanning the crime scene. Even at a distance, Sevgi could see how ashen his face was.

  “Sev?”

  “Over here.” She waved from the steps of the building, and Norton spotted her. He swung his door wider, stepped down, and closed it again. Brief words with the uniforms in his way, a display of badges, and they opened a path for him. Someone went to shut off the barrier breach alarm, and quiet soaked back into the street. The Land Rover backed up a couple of meters and sat there rumbling like the elegant tank it essentially was. The driver did not emerge.

  “Overreacting a bit, aren’t we?” Sevgi asked as Norton reached them.

  He grimaced. “Tell that to Ortiz.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Relative to what? He isn’t dead, if that’s what you mean. They’ve got him hooked up to half the life-support machines avai
lable over at Weill Cornell. Major organ damage, but he’ll have ready stock cultured somewhere. Family’ve been notified.” Norton looked sick as he stared around at the shrink-wrapped corpses. “What the fuck was he doing over here anyway, Sev?”

  She shook her head.

  “I think he was here to see me,” said Marsalis, rising to his feet for the first time since the assault. He yawned cavernously.

  Norton eyed him with dislike. “All about you, huh?”

  “NYPD are all over him, Tom,” said Sevgi, defusing. “Detective in charge hardly gave a shit about Ortiz, all he wanted to talk about was how come we’d got an unlicensed thirteen on the streets.”

  “Right.” Norton sharpened on the new task. “What’s this detective’s name?”

  “Williamson. Out of the Twenty-eighth.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “He’s already been talked to. That’s not what I meant. I think it might play better if we let this look like an attempt on Ortiz.”

  “You think it wasn’t?” Norton blinked. He gestured at one of the dead assassins. “Skater crew, Sev. Track the limo through traffic, that’s standard gang operating procedure. Ten, twelve city murders a year the exact same way. What else are you going to make of this?”

  Sevgi nodded at Marsalis.

  “Oh come on. Sev, you’ve got to be kidding me. We’ve been in town less than a day. Who knew we were here?”

  “Makes no sense the other way around, either, Tom. These guys were street. A real ground-level hit squad. What are they doing coming after someone fiftieth-floor like Ortiz? Man wouldn’t know street if it bit him in the ass.”

  “It just did,” Marsalis said, deadpan.

  Norton spared him a hard look. Sevgi stepped in.

  “Look, whatever just went down here, we had more than enough publicity we didn’t need in Florida. Let’s not have a repeat performance. Ask the cops to kill the thirteen angle, make sure the media don’t run it. For public consumption purposes, Marsalis here can be just another heroic COLIN bodyguard, identity protected so that he can continue his good work.”