Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  To underline the point, she had a reception detachment meet them at the other end. Three unsmiling indigenas, one male, two female, who brought them out of the terminal with hardened, watchful care to where an armored Land Rover waited under harsh lighting in the no-parking zone. Beyond was soft darkness, a smog-blurred moon and the vague bulk of mountains rising in the distance. As soon as they were all inside the Land Rover, the female operative gave her a gun—a Beretta Marstech, with two clips and a soft leather shoulder holster. She hadn’t requested it. Welcome to La Paz, the woman said, with or without irony Sevgi could not decide. Then they were in motion again, shuttled smoothly through the sleeping streets to a dedicated suite in the new Hilton Acantilado, with views out across the bowl of the city, and Marstech-level security systems. A beautifully styled Bang & Olufsen data/coms portal sat unobtrusively in the corner of every section but the bathroom, which had its own phone. The beds were vast, begging to be used.

  They stood at opposite ends of the floor-to-ceiling window and stared out. It was, once again, obscenely early in the morning—they’d outrun the sun, dumping it scornfully behind them as the suborbital bounced off its trajectory peak and plunged back down to Earth. Now the predawn darkness beyond the windows jarred, and the inverted starscape bowl of city lights below them whispered up a weightless sense of the unreal. It all felt like too much time in virtual. Thin air and hunger just added to the load. Sevgi could feel herself getting vague.

  “Want to eat?” she asked.

  He shot her a glance she recognized. “Don’t tempt me.”

  “Food,” she said primly. “All I’ve eaten in the past day is that simit.”

  “Price of progress. On a flatline flight, they would have fed us twice at least. The untold downside of the suborb-traveler lifestyle.”

  “Do you want to eat or not?”

  “Sure. Whatever they’ve got.” He went to the Bang & Olufsen, checked the welcome-screen protocol, and fired the system up. She shook her head, took a last look at the view, and went to order from the next room.

  Midway through scanning the services menu, she accidentally brought up the health section. Her eye caught on the subheading tab stimulants and synaptic enhancers, and she realized with a slight jolt that she hadn’t taken any syn for the best part of twenty-four hours.

  Hadn’t wanted any.

  The first time Carl wanted Manco Bambarén’s attention, three years back, he’d gotten it by the simple expedient of sounding out the tayta’s business interests and then doing them as much rapid damage as he easily could. It was an old Osprey tactic from the Central Asian theater, and it transferred without too much trouble.

  Bambarén’s particular limb of the familias were moving exotic fabric out of prep camp warehouses in quantities small enough not to trigger a COLIN response, amassing the scavenged gear in isolated village locations and then trucking it down to Lima to feed the insatiable maw of the Marstech black market. It wasn’t hard to get detail on this—pretty much everyone knew about it, but bribes and kickbacks kept the much-vaunted but badly paid Peruvian security forces out of the equation, and Bambarén was smart enough to limit his pilfering to relatively commonplace tech items no longer sensitive at a patent level. The corporations claimed on their insurance, made the right noises but no great effort otherwise to plug the leaks. In tacit quid pro quo, Bambarén stayed out of their hair on the more vexing issue of local labor relations, where the familias had a traditional influence that could have been problematic if it were ever deployed. Local loyalties and Bambarén’s ferocious Cuzco slum street rep did the rest. It was a sweet-running system, and since it kept everyone happy, it showed potential to run that way for a long time to come.

  Carl had entered the equation with no local ax to grind and nothing to lose but his bounty for Stefan Nevant. For two quiet weeks, he’d done his research, and then one night he held up one of tayta Manco’s trucks on the precipitous, winding highway down from Cuzco to Nazca and the coast. The armed muscle in the passenger seat took exception, which from a logistical point of view was a blessing in disguise. Carl shot him dead, then gave the driver the option of either joining his companion in the white powdered dirt by the side of the road or helping Carl roll the vehicle over the edge with an incendiary grenade—Peruvian army stock, he’d bought it from a friendly grunt—taped to its fuel tank. The driver proved cooperative, and the hardware worked. The truck exploded spectacularly on its first cartwheeling bounce, trailed flame and debris down into the canyon below, and burned there merrily for an hour or so, releasing enough exotic long-chain pollutants into the atmosphere to attract the attention of an environmental monitoring satellite. Not many things burned with that signature, and the things that did had no business being on fire outside of COLIN jurisdiction. Helicopters gathered in the night, like big moths around a campfire. With them came the inevitable journalists, and not far behind them a sprinkling of local politicians, environmental experts, and Earth First reps, all keen to get some media profile. Presently, an official recovery team made its painstaking way down into the ravine, but not before a lot of embarrassing spectrographics had been shot and a lot of equally embarrassing questions sharpened to a fine edge on the whetstone of starved journalistic speculation.

  By then, Carl was long gone. He’d given the truck driver a lift down to Nazca and a message to hand on to tayta Manco with a number to call. Bambarén, who was no fool, called the next day, and after a certain amount of male display rage asked what exactly the fuck Carl wanted, motherfucker. Carl told him. Thirty-six hours after that, Stefan Nevant walked back into his Arequipa hotel room and found himself looking down the barrel of the Haag gun.

  Subtlety, Carl had discovered, was a much overrated tool where organized crime was concerned.

  In the Bolivian predawn, he dialed accordingly.

  “This had better be life or fucking death,” Greta Jurgens said coldly when she finally answered. The screen showed her settling in front of the phone, pulling a gray silk dressing gown closer about her. Her face was puffy. “Do you know what time it is?”

  Carl made a show of consulting his watch.

  “Yeah, it’s October. I figure that gives me another couple of weeks before it’s your bedtime. How’s things, Greta?”

  The hibernoid squinted at the screen, and her face lost all expression. “Well, well. Marsalis, right? The bogeyman.”

  “The very same.”

  “What do you want?”

  “That’s what I like about you, Greta. Charming small talk.” Carl floated a casual, open-handed gesture. “It’s nothing much. Wanted to talk to Manco. Strictly a chat, old-times stuff.”

  “Manco’s not in town right now.”

  “But you know how to get hold of him.”

  Jurgens said nothing. Her face wasn’t just puffy, it was rounder than he remembered it, smooth-skinned and chubby with late-cycle subcutaneous fat uptake. He guessed her thinking was groggier than usual, too—silence was the safe option.

  Carl grinned. “Look, we can do this one of two ways. Either you can tell Manco I want a word and we arrange a friendly sitdown, or I can start making your lives difficult again. What’s it going to be?”

  “You might find that a little harder to do these days.”

  “Really? Made some new Initiative friends, have we?” He read the confirmation in the hibernoid’s face. “Do yourself and Manco both a favor, Greta. Trace this call and find out whose wafer I’m running on. Then decide whether you want to piss me off.”

  He killed the line and Greta Jurgens blinked out in midretort.

  Carl got up and went to stare down at the lights of La Paz. A couple of hours at worst, he reckoned. Jurgens had specialists a phone call away who could run the trace, and it wouldn’t take them very long to nail it to COLIN’s dedicated Hilton suite. Marstech-level systems showed up in the dataflow like implanted metal on an X-ray plate. The familia datahawks probably wouldn’t be able to get past the tech; Jurgens in any case probab
ly wouldn’t ask them to. But it would still be pretty fucking clear what they were looking at, thank you very much. Say an hour to do all that. Then, allow that Jurgens had been telling the truth and Manco Bambarén wasn’t with her in Arequipa. Wherever he was, he could be reached, and that wouldn’t take long, either. And with what Jurgens had to tell him, he’d call back.

  Ertekin came back through from the other room. She’d changed into the NYPD T-shirt and a pair of running sweats.

  “Food’s here,” she said.

  In the buffered quiet of the suite, he hadn’t heard it arrive. He nodded. “Shouldn’t eat too much at this altitude. Your body’s working hard enough as it is.”

  “Yeah, Marsalis.” She gave him a hands-on-hips sort of look. “I have been on the altiplano a couple of times before. COLIN employee, you know?”

  “That’s not what it says on your chest,” he told her, looking there pointedly.

  “This?” She pressed a hand to one breast and tapped the nypd logo with her fingertips. A grin crept into the corner of her mouth “You got a problem with me wearing this?”

  He grinned back. “Not if you let me take it off you after breakfast.”

  “We’ll see,” she said, unconvincingly.

  But after breakfast, there was no time. The phone chimed while they were still talking, sitting with the big clay mugs of mate de coca cupped in both hands. Outside call, the system announced in smooth female tones. Carl took his mug through to the next room to answer. He dropped into the chair in front of the Bang & Olufsen and thumbed the accept button.

  “Yeah?”

  Manco Bambarén’s weather-blasted Inca features stared out at him from the screen. His face was impassive, but there was a slow smoking anger in the dark eyes. He spoke harsh, bite-accented English.

  “So, black man. You return to plague us.”

  “Well, historically, that ought to be a change for you guys.” Carl sipped the thin-tasting tea, met the other man’s eyes through rising steam. “Better than being plagued by the white man, right?”

  “Don’t play word games with me, twist. What do you want?”

  Carl slipped into Quechua. “I’m only quoting your oaths of unity there. Indigenous union, from the ashes of racial oppression, all that shit. What do I want? I want to talk to you. Face-to-face. Take a couple of hours at most.”

  Bambarén leaned into the screen. “I no longer concern myself with your scurrying escapee brothers and their bolt-holes. I have nothing to tell you.”

  “Yeah, Greta said you’d gone up in the world. No more fake-ID work, huh? No more low-level Marstech pilfering. I guess you’re a respectable criminal these days.” Carl let his voice harden. “Makes no difference. I want to talk anyway. Pick a place.”

  There was a long pause while Bambarén tried to stare him down. Carl inhaled the tea steam, took down the damp, green-leaf odor of it, and waited.

  “You still speak my language like a drunken peasant laborer,” said the familia chief sourly. “And act as if it were an accomplishment.”

  Carl shrugged. “Well, I learned it among peasant laborers, and we were often drunk. My apologies if it offends. Now pick a fucking place to meet.”

  More silence. Bambarén glowered. “I am in Cuzco,” he said. Even in the lilting altiplano Quechua, the words sounded bitten off. “I’ll see you out at Sacsayhuamán at one this afternoon.”

  “Make it three,” Carl told him lazily. “I’ve got a few other things I want to do first.”

  CHAPTER 29

  He still had the deep oil-and-salt scent of Sevgi Ertekin on his fingers later as he sat in the COLIN jeep with his chin propped up on his thumb, staring glumly at the scenery and waiting for Manco Bambarén. It was his sole source of cheer in an otherwise poisonous mood. Jet lag and the showdown with Nevant were catching up with him like running dogs. He’d bought two new sets of clothes through the hotel’s services net, didn’t much like any of them when they arrived, could not be bothered to send them back and start again. They were black and hard wearing—like me, he thought sourly—and top-of-the-line. The latest generation of declassified Marstech fabrics, released to the high-end public amid a fog of testimonials from global celebrities and ex-Mars personnel. He hated them, but they’d have to fucking do.

  Out of sheer contrariness, he kept the S(t)igma jacket.

  “He’s late,” she said, from behind the jeep’s wheel.

  “Of course he’s late. He’s making a point.”

  Through the windshield, the grassy terraces of Sacsayhuamán rose on walls of massive, smoothly interlocking stone, dark under a glaring white-clouded sky. This late in the day, they had the ruins almost to themselves, and the emptiness lent the ramparts a brooding air. There were a few late-season tourists wandering about the site, but the scale of the Inca building blocks dwarfed them. Similarly reduced, a small knot of locals in traditional dress had withdrawn to the margins, women and children minding long-suffering llamas done up in ribbons, all waiting for a paying photo opportunity. They made tiny flecks of color against the somber stone.

  It wasn’t the first time Carl had seen Sacsayhuamán, but as always the stonework fascinated him. The blocks were shaped and finished but hugely irregular, echoing the slumped solid enormity of natural rock formations. The jigsaw lines between them drew your eye like detail in a painting. You could sit there just looking at it all for quite a while, which—he glanced at his watch—they had been.

  “You think he’s making a point with this as well?” Ertekin nodded forward at the walls. “Land of my fathers, that kind of thing?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you don’t think so?”

  He shot her a side glance. “Did I say that?”

  “You might as well have.”

  He went back to staring at the stonework. Ghostly beyond, Nevant grinned at him out of a bloodstained, broken-nosed face, pale with hospital lighting. Your feelings are your own, Mars man. Wallow in them as you see fit.

  He made an effort.

  “You could be right,” he admitted. “The guy does talk like a fucking poet half the time, and he’s seriously impressed with himself. So yeah, maybe he is getting all cultural on us.”

  Ertekin nodded. “Thought so.”

  Ten more minutes crept by. Carl was thinking about getting out to stretch his legs when an armored black Range Rover rolled bumpily across the rough turf parking area to their left. Smoked-glass windows, glossy curved flanks, anti-grenade skirt almost to the floor. Carl dropped his introspection. The jet lag folded away.

  “Here we go.”

  The new arrival braked to a halt, and a door cracked in the black carapace. Manco Bambarén stepped out, immaculately attired in a sand-colored suit and flanked by bodyguards in Ray-Bans that matched his own. No visible weapons, but there didn’t need to be. The stances and blank, reflective sun-shade menace were old-school South America; Carl had seen the same thing deployed all over, on streets from Buenos Aires to Bogotá. The mirror patches Bambarén and his guards had in place of eyes talked up the same exclusive power as the shiny bombproof flanks on the Range Rover. You saw yourself thrown back in the reflecting surfaces, sealed outside and of no importance to the eyes within.

  Carl climbed out of the jeep.

  “I’m coming with you,” said Ertekin quickly.

  “Suit yourself. It’s all going to be in Quechua anyway.”

  He crossed the turf to the Range Rover, pushing down an unnecessary surge from the mesh. He intended to lean on Bambarén, but he didn’t think it’d come to a fight, however much he’d have liked to smash the mirror shades back in splinters into the eyes behind, take a limb from the bigger of the two guards, and—

  Whoa, Carl. Let’s keep this in perspective, shall we?

  He reached the familia chief and stopped, just out of reach.

  “Hello, Manco. Thanks for coming. Could have left the kids at home, though.”

  “Black man.” Manco jerked his chin. “Nice coat you have ther
e. Jesusland threads?”

  Carl nodded. “South Florida State.”

  “Thought so. Got a cousin had one just like it.”

  Carl touched finger and thumb to the lapel of the S(t)igma jacket. “Yeah, going to be a major fashion anytime now.”

  “It was my understanding,” said the familia chief urbanely, “that in Jesusland it already is. Highest incarceration rate on the planet, they say. So who’s your tits and ass?”

  Carl turned casually and saw that Ertekin had gotten out as well, but hadn’t followed him. As he watched, she leaned back on the jeep beside the COLIN decal and put her hands in her pockets. The movement shifted her jacket aside, showed the strap of her shoulder holster. She’d put on her shades.

  He held down a grin. “That’s not tits and ass, that’s a friend.”

  “A thirteen with friends.” Bambarén’s eyebrows showed above the curve of the sunglasses. “Must go against the grain for you.”

  “We adapt to circumstance. Want to walk?”

  Manco Bambarén nodded at his security and they relaxed, opening space around their tayta. He took a couple of paces away from the Range Rover, in the direction of the stone walls. Carl fell into step. He saw the familia chief squinting sideways behind his sun lenses, toward the jeep and Ertekin’s casual watchfulness.

  “So you work for COLIN now?”

  “With.” Carl let his grin out. “I work with COLIN. It’s a cooperative venture. You should understand that.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you’ve made a niche career out of coexisting with the Initiative, and from what Greta said it’s a flourishing relationship.”

  Bambarén shook his head. “I don’t believe Greta Jurgens discussed my business associations with you.”

  “No, but she tried to threaten me with them. The implication was that you have bigger friends these days, and you keep them closer.”

  “And this is what you wanted to talk about?”

  “No. I want to talk about Stefan Nevant.”

  “Nevant?” A frown wrinkled the tayta’s forehead. “What about him?”