Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  So. Planning to pay for our own suborb ticket, are we? And look for a new job when we get back?

  It won’t come to that. They need me worse than di Palma’s dented pride.

  They don’t need you worse than a breach of the Accords. Which is what it’s going to be if you pick up that phone again and call Sevgi Ertekin. You heard the man. Any further professional contact.

  The phone sat in his hand.

  Just go home, Carl. You gave them their monster, got another notch on your belt, right up there next to Gray. Thirteen liquidator, top of your game. Just take that and ride it home, maybe even bluff it into a raise when you get back.

  The phone.

  Come on, leave her alone. You’re not doing her any favors, pushing this. Let her walk away like she wants to.

  Maybe she doesn’t really want to walk away.

  Oh, how very alpha-male of you. What’s next, form an Angry Young tribute band? People got to lead their own lives, Carl.

  He tightened his fingers on the smooth plastic of the receiver. Touched it to his head. His whole body ached, he realized suddenly, a dozen different small, jabbing reminders of the fight with Merrin.

  Merrin’s done, Carl. All over.

  There’s still Norton. Lying fuck tried to have you killed in New York, maybe down in Peru as well.

  You don’t know that.

  He’s right next to her still. She starts asking awkward questions, he could have her hit the same way he tried with you.

  You don’t know he did that. And anyway, he’s a little too dewy-eyed around Sevgi Ertekin to let anything like that happen to her, and you know it.

  He grunted. Lowered the phone and stared at it again.

  Give it up, Carl. You’re just looking for excuses to get back inside something you never wanted to be a part of in the first place. Just cut it loose and go home.

  He grimaced. Dialed from memory.

  Sevgi took the call on her way through a seemingly endless consumer space. Late-afternoon crowds clogged the malls and the open-access stores, crippled her pace to limping. She had to keep slowing and darting sideways to get past stalled-out families or knots of dawdling finery-decked youth. She had to queue on escalators as they cranked their slow, ease-of-gawking trajectories up and down in the dizzying cathedral spaces of racked product. She had to shoulder through gathered accretions of bargain hunters under holosigns that screamed reduced, reduced, reduced to this.

  It had been the same fucking thing all day, everywhere she went in the upper levels of Bulgakov’s Cat. The temptation to produce badge and gun to clear passage was a palpable itch in the pit of her stomach.

  “Yeah, Ertekin.”

  “Alcatraz Control here. I have a patched call for you, will you take it?”

  “Patched?” She frowned. “Patched from where?”

  “New York, apparently. A Detective Williamson?”

  She grappled with memory—saw again the tall, hard-boned black man amid uniforms and incident barriers and the shrink-wrapped corpses outside her home. Marsalis, seated on the front steps, gazing at it all like a tourist, as if the dead men were nothing to do with him at all. Crisp October air, and the never-stilled sounds of the city getting on with life. New York seemed suddenly as far away as Mars, and the gun battle some part of her distant past.

  “Yeah, I’ll take it.”

  Williamson came through, wavery with the patch. “Ms. Ertekin?”

  “Speaking.” A little breathless from her pace through a bookstore with mercifully few browsing customers.

  “Is this a bad time?”

  “No worse than any other. What can I do for you, Detective?”

  “It’s more what I can do for you, Ms. Ertekin. We have some information you might like.” He hesitated for a moment. “I ran into Larry Kasabian. He speaks very highly of you.”

  She blinked back to the mist-deadened sounds of the IA digging robot, the field at dawn, and the sudden waft of the bodies. Kasabian at her side, blunt and silent, an occasional flickered glance under knotted brows. Once, he nodded grimly at her, some barely perceptible amalgam of solidarity and weariness, but he never spoke. It was the habit of weeks now—they were all watching their words. IA were all over the place, authorized to listen electronically who knew where.

  “That’s very kind of Larry.” She fended off a bovine gaggle of shoppers grazing amid menswear, hopped half to a halt, and dodged around them. “And kind of you to call me. So what have you got?”

  “What I’ve got, Ms. Ertekin, is your third shooter for Alvaro Ortiz.”

  She nearly stopped again, in clear space. “Is he alive?”

  “Very much so. There’s a hole in his shoulder, but otherwise he’ll be just fine. Got into a fight in a bar over in Brooklyn, pulled a piece, and it turns out the place is full of off-duty cops.” Williamson chuckled. “You believe that luck?”

  “Not a local boy then?”

  “No, he’s from the Republic, someplace out west. Dirk Shindel. Right of residence in the Union, he’s got a grandparent up in Maine somewhere, but no official citizenship. We can’t put him at the scene with genetic trace, but he’s copped to it anyway.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “We’re sweating him pretty hard,” Williamson said casually. “Got one of the Homicide psych teams on it. Thing is, our boy Dirk was all fucked up on hormone jolts and street syn when the Brooklyn thing went down. You know what a cocktail like that’ll do. He’s babbling like a snake handler.”

  Along her nerves, Sevgi felt the subtle thrum of her own decidedly nonstreet syn dosage. She summoned a dutiful chuckle. “Yeah, seen that before. So what’s he said about Ortiz?”

  “Said a whole lot of stuff, I can file it over to you if you want. Boils down to he was hired out of Houston by some front guy he’s never met, friend of the other two in the crew. Quite a lot of money, which I guess for a hit on a guy like Ortiz you’d expect, but it doesn’t explain why the low-grade hires. Shindel says he’s whacked guys before, in the Republic, but the psych team think he’s lying. At best, they reckon he was maybe a driver or a backup man.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Yeah, Leroy Atkins. That’s the guy your, uh, enhanced friend put down with the machine pistol. Turns out he’s got some record in the Republic, but strictly spray-and-run stuff. Cop I talked to in the Houston PD said he thought Atkins might have upped his game in the last couple of years, gone out of state for the work. Nothing they can touch him for, it’s just street rumor and implied Yaroshanko links from some West Coast n-djinn Houston rent time on. Same with the other guy, uh, Fabiano, Angel Fabiano. Houston resident, some gang affiliations down there. Been doing time since he was a kid, but they never got him for worse than possession of abortifacients with intent to sell, and some aggravated assault. But Houston reckon he might have upgraded as well. He’s a known associate of Atkins.”

  “Okay.” Disloyalty for Norton snaked in her, deep enough to force a grimace onto her face. She asked anyway. “Did Shindel have anything to say about Marsalis?”

  “Marsalis? The thirteen guy?” Pause while Williamson presumably scrolled through the report. “No. Nothing here outside of we would have brought the whole thing off, too, that fucking nigger twist hadn’t been there. No offense.”

  “No offense?”

  “Yeah.” Williamson’s tone shifted into sour amusement. “One of the psych team’s the same color as me. This is one sensitive Jesuslander we’re dealing with here.”

  Sevgi grunted. “Probably the syn talking. He tell you how they ended up outside my front door?”

  “Yeah, he was pissed about that, too. Told us they’d been watching Ortiz for weeks, mapping his moves. Seems he always went by this coffeehouse he liked on West Ninety-seventh, they were going to track him across there on the skates and light him up outside. The skates, that’s an old Houston sicario standby, apparently. Good for city-center hits where you’ve got high-volume, slow-moving traffic. Anyw
ay, the way Shindel paints it, Ortiz breaks his routine and heads uptown suddenly, they go after him but it nearly kills them to keep up. By the time they get to Hundred eighteenth, they’re panting like dogs, they just want to get this thing finished.”

  “Very pro.” She could hear the lightness in her own tone. The vindication of Norton blew through her like a cool breeze. She even found a smile for some face-painted idiot who collided with her coming around a support column and then backed off all apologies and smiles.

  “Right,” Williamson agreed. “Not quite Houston’s finest, it seems.”

  “No.”

  “Yeah.” The New York detective hesitated again. “So like I said, I talked to Kasabian. He told me you’d want to know. Was going to hang on to this until you were back in town, but then I caught you on that news flash out of the Rim this morning. So I figure the Rim, that’s where Ortiz is from originally, maybe this ties in to whatever you’re dealing with out there.”

  The press conference, hastily called in a deck-level government garden amidships, her dry lack-of-progress report buffered by wooden professions of coordinated effort from RimSec and the Cat’s security services, a brief, sonorous pronouncement from a local political aide—it all seemed to be sliding into the past at alarming speed as well. She made a fleeting match with the feeling she’d had on the highway out of Cuzco, the sense of time slipping through her fingers. Marsalis at her side like a dark rock she could maybe cling to. She grimaced. Shouldered the image aside, like another drowsy shopper getting in her way.

  “Well, listen, Detective, I appreciate you taking the trouble to hand me this. See if I can’t return the favor someday.”

  “No need. Like I said, saw the news flash. Lot of talk about agency cooperation in America these days, a lot of talk. I figure maybe it’s time there actually started to be some, too.”

  “I hear that. Can you wire the Shindel file across to RimSec at Alcatraz? I’ll pick it up there later.”

  “Will do. Hope it helps.”

  The New York patch clicked out, taking Williamson’s accent and the winter city with it. Left her with the star-static almost-hush of satellite time, and then nothing at all.

  “Nothing. That’s what I’m telling you.”

  Carl shook his head irritably. “Matthew, I told you this guy just doesn’t feel right. Are you sure?”

  “I am better than sure, Carl. I am mathematically accurate. Tom Norton’s associational set is as close to perfectly behaved citizenship as it’s possible for a human to get. The worst blemish I can find is a data-implication that his brother may have helped him get his job at COLIN. But you’re talking about a good word in the right ear, not outright nepotism. And it’s years in the past, no sense of a continuing influence.”

  “You certain about that?”

  “Yes, I am certain. In fact, the data suggests that he and his brother don’t get on all that well. Same-sex sibling relationships are often combative, and in this case the Nortons seem to have resolved theirs by living at opposite ends of the continent.”

  Carl stared at the hotel window, where evening was already starting to shut down the sky. His reflection stared back, hemmed him in. He put a crooked elbow to the glass and leaned on it with his forearm over his head, fingers stroking through his hair. It was something Marisol used to—

  “And the New York hit? The fact he was the only person who knew where I was sleeping?”

  “Is coincidence,” said Matthew crisply.

  He met his reflection’s eyes in the glass. “Well, it doesn’t feel much like it from where I’m standing.”

  “Coincidence never does. It’s not in the nature of human genetic wiring to accept it. And as a thirteen, you have your own increased predisposition toward paranoia to contend with as well.”

  Carl grimaced. “Has it ever occurred to you Matt, that—”

  “Matthew.”

  “Yeah, Matthew. Sorry. Has it ever occurred to you that for a thirteen, for someone who doesn’t connect well with group dynamics, paranoia might be quite a useful trait to have?”

  “Yes, and evolutionarily selective, too.” The datahawk’s didactic tone had not shifted. It almost never did; didactic was part of the way Matthew was wired. “But this is not the point. Human intuition is deceptive, because it is not always consistent. It is not necessarily a good fit for the environments we now live in, or the mathematics that underlie them. When it does echo mathematical form, it’s clearly indicative of an inherent capacity to detect the underlying mathematics.”

  “But not when they clash.” Carl leaned his forehead against the glass. They’d had this discussion before, countless times. “Right?”

  “Not when they clash,” Matthew agreed. “When they clash, the mathematics remain correct. The intuition merely indicates a mismatch of evolved capacities with a changed or changing environment.”

  “So Norton’s clean?”

  “Norton is clean.”

  Carl turned his back on his reflection. Leaned against the window and looked around the room that caged him. He recognized the reflex—seeking exits. Stupid, there was the fucking door, right there.

  So use it, fuckwit.

  “Does it ever bother you?” he asked into the phone.

  “Does what bother me, Carl?”

  “This whole thing.” He gestured as if Matthew could see him. “Jacobsen, the fucking Accords, the Agency and the enforcement. Having to be licensed like some fucking hazardous substance.”

  “To the extent that personal identification records are a form of social licensing, we are all licensed, base humans and variants alike. If the type of licensing reflects certain gradients of social risk, is that a bad thing?”

  Carl sighed. “Okay, forget it. I’m asking the wrong person.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, no offense, but you’re a gleech. Your whole profile is post-autistic. This is an emotional thing we’re talking about.”

  “My emotional range has been psychochemically rebalanced and extended.”

  “Yeah, by an n-djinn. Sorry, Matthew, I don’t know why I’m fronting you with this stuff. You’re no more normal than I am.”

  “Leaving aside for a moment the question of what exactly you would consider to be a normal human, what makes you think you would receive a more valid answer from one? Are normal humans especially gifted in discovering complex ethical truths?”

  Carl thought about that.

  “Not that I’ve noticed,” he admitted gloomily. “No.”

  “So my perception of the post-Jacobsen order is probably no more or less useful than any other rational human’s.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just the big fat point.” Carl grinned. There was a solid pleasure in showing up the datahawk and his hyperbalanced mind-set, mainly because he didn’t get to do it very often. “This isn’t about rational humans. The Jacobsen Report wasn’t about a rational response to genetic licensing, it was about a group of rational men trying to broker a deal with the gibbering mass of irrational humanity. The religious lunatics, the race purists, the whole doom-of-civilization crew.” For a moment, he stared off blindly into a corner of the room. “I mean, don’t you remember all that stuff back in ’89, ’90? The demonstrations? The vitriol in the feeds? The mobs outside the facilities and the army bases, crashing the fences?”

  “Yes. I remember it. But it did not bother me.”

  Carl shrugged. “Well, you didn’t scare them like we did.”

  “And yet Jacobsen was not a capitulation to the forces you describe. The report is critical of both irrational responses and simplistic thinking.”

  “Yeah. But look who ended up in the tracts anyway.”

  Matthew said nothing. Carl saw Stefan Nevant’s lupine grin, rubbed at his eyes to make it go away.

  “Look, Matt, thanks—”

  “Matthew.”

  “Sorry. Matthew. Thanks for the check on Norton, ’kay? Talk to you soon.”

  He hung up. Tossed the ph
one on the bed and got rapidly dressed in the least used and bloodied garments from among his limited wardrobe. He let himself out of the hotel room, paused briefly on his way past Sevgi Ertekin’s door, then made an exasperated noise in his throat and stalked on. He waited ten impatient seconds at the elevator, then stiff-armed the door to the emergency stairwell open instead and went down the steps two at a time. Crossed the lobby at a fast stride and went out into the city. He walked a single block to get the feel of the evening, then flagged down an autocab.

  The interior was low-lit and cozy, an expansive black leatherette womb with slash-narrow views to the passing street. In the gloom on the front panel, an armored screen blipped into life and showed him a rather idealized female driver interface. Generic Rim beauty, the classic Asian-Hispanic blend. Pinned dark hair, a hint of a curl in it, chic high-collar jacket. Something of Carmen Ren in the features and the poise, but machined up to an inhuman perfection. The voice was an Asia Badawi rip-off.

  “Good evening, sir. Welcome to Cable Cars. What will be your choice of destination this evening?”

  He hesitated. Sutherland, he knew, would not have been impressed with this.

  Sutherland’s on fucking Mars.

  “Just take me somewhere I can get in a fight,” he said.

  Switched off and careless from jet lag, long sleep, and yesterday’s combat, he never noticed the figure on the corner that watched him leave the hotel, or the nondescript teardrop that slid out from parking on the opposite side of the street and dropped into the traffic behind his cab.

  CHAPTER 41

  Dougie Kwang’s week had been shaping up for shit ever since it started, and tonight didn’t look any better. He was three games down to Valdez already, stalking the angles of the table, pumping violent, crack-bang shots to take his mind off it all. The technique—if you want to call it that, he fumed—mostly just rattled the balls in the jaws, and they sat out more often than he sank them. He knew his anger was the exact reason he was losing, but he couldn’t shake it loose. There was too much else gone to shit around him.