Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “So.” Jeff frowned. “Who’s she working for now?”

  “She’s working for you, Jeff,” said the black man.

  The moment hung in the room, creaked and turned like a corpse at the end of a rope. Norton was watching his brother’s eyes, and all he needed to see was there. Then Jeff jerked his eyes away, twisted about, stared up at Marsalis. The thirteen hadn’t turned from the window. Jeff looked at the broad back, the jacket lettered with s(t)igma, the lack of motion. He swung back to his brother.

  “Tom?”

  Norton reached into his pocket and produced the phone. He looked into Jeff’s face and thumb-touched the playback.

  “Guava Diamond?”

  “Still holding.”

  “We are unable to assist, Guava Diamond. Repeat, we are unable to assist. Suggest—”

  “You what? You bonobo-sucking piece of shit, you’d better tell me I misheard that.”

  “There are control complications at this end. We cannot act. I’m sorry, Guava Diamond. You’re on your own.”

  “You will be fucking sorry if we make it out of this in one piece.”

  “I repeat, Guava Diamond, we cannot act. Suggest you implement Lizard immediately, and get off Bulgakov’s Cat while you can. You may still have time.”

  Pause.

  “You’re a fucking dead man, Claw Control.”

  Static hiss.

  They all listened to the white-noise emptiness of it for a couple of moments, as if they’d just heard the last transmission of a plane going down into the ocean. Norton thumbed the phone to off.

  “That’s you, Jeff,” he said quietly. “Tell me it’s not.”

  “Tom, you know you can fake a voice like that as easily as—”

  He jammed to a halt as the black man’s hands sank weightily onto his shoulders from behind. Marsalis leaned over him.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  Jeff stared across the sofa space at Norton. “Tom? Tom, I’m your fucking brother, for Christ’s sake.”

  Norton nodded. “Yeah. You’d better tell us everything you know.”

  “Tom, you can’t seriously—”

  “Sevgi is dead!” Suddenly he was yelling, trembling, throat swollen with the force of it, memories of the hospital swirling. “She is fucking dead, Jeff, because you hid this from me, she is dead!”

  Marsalis’s hands stayed where they were. Norton gritted his teeth, tried to master the shaking that would not stop. He clamped his mouth tight, breathing hard.

  “Bonobo-sucking piece of shit,” he got out. “She called you right, didn’t she, Jeff. She knew you well.”

  “Tom, you don’t understand.”

  “Not yet, we don’t,” said Marsalis. He lifted one hand, slapped it down again on Jeff’s shoulder, encouraging. “But you are going to tell us.”

  “I.” Jeff shook his head. “You don’t understand, I can’t.”

  Marsalis lifted his head and looked directly at Norton. Norton felt something kick in his stomach, something that made him feel sick but was somehow a release as well. He nodded.

  The black man hooked one hand into Jeff Norton’s throat, dragged him back against the sofa. His fingers dug in. His other arm wrapped around Jeff’s chest, pinning one arm, holding him in place. Jeff made a shocked, choking sound, flailed about on the sofa, tugged at the thirteen’s grip with his only free hand. Marsalis grabbed the flapping arm at the wrist and held it out of the way. Jeff heaved, flopped, could not get loose.

  “You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” said Marsalis coldly. It was the same voice that Norton had heard him use, in Quechua, on Gutierrez. “Someone is going to bleed for Sevgi Ertekin. Someone’s going to die. Right now, we’ve got you. You don’t give us someone else, then you’re it. You try keeping what you know from me, RimSec are going to find you floating in the bay with every bone in your body broken and both your eyes put out.”

  Norton watched, made himself watch. Jeff’s gaze clawed frantically at him, out of a face turning blue. But Sevgi’s fading was crowded into his head like someone shouting herself hoarse, and it kept him pinned in his seat, watching.

  “You killed her, Jeff,” he said, and his voice had a quiet, reasonable tone to it that felt like the rising edge of madness. “Someone’s got to pay.”

  “Onbekend!”

  It was a strangled grunt, barely recognizable. Marsalis caught it while Norton was still sorting meaning out of the crushed syllables. He unhinged his grip on Jeff’s throat and chest, hauled on the arm he’d captured at the wrist, dragged it up and around so Jeff was forced flat to the sofa. Marsalis leaned over and pressed the side of Jeff’s head down hard into the fabric, dug into the other man’s temple with his knuckles. Jeff coughed and gagged, whooped for breath, eyes flooded with tears.

  “What about Onbekend?” Norton asked.

  The dizzying sense of insanity had not gone. It circled him like a street gang. He wondered, in the midst of the revolving horror of it all, if this was what it felt like to be a thirteen, if this was what you had to embrace to live the way Marsalis did and Merrin had. He wondered how easy it would be to let go, and if you could ever find your grip again afterward.

  Jeff made raw panting sounds.

  “What about Onbekend?”

  “All right, I’ll tell you, I’ll fucking tell you.” Jeff’s voice cracked. He stopped trying to get loose. He lay on the sofa, swallowing breath, leaking slow tears onto the fabric. “Just let me up. Please.”

  Again, Marsalis flickered a glance at Norton. Norton nodded. My brother’s not a soldier or a thug, he’d told the thirteen the previous night. He’s not physically tough that way, he won’t stand up. Just let me call it. We’ll get everything we need from him.

  Marsalis hauled Jeff into a sitting position on the sofa. He moved and took up a position by the desk. Folded his arms.

  “Let’s hear it, then.”

  Jeff’s eyes went from the black man to his brother. Norton stared back.

  “Tom…”

  “You heard him, Jeff. Let’s hear it.”

  Jeff Norton seemed to collapse in on himself. He shuddered. Marsalis and Norton exchanged a glance. Norton lifted a hand in his lap. Wait. Jeff rubbed his hands over his face, dragged them back through his hair. He sniffed hard, wiped his eyes. Yeah, cry, Jeff, Norton caught himself thinking, with a violence that rocked him to the core. Cry like the fucking rest of us have been. Like Sevgi and me and Marsalis and Megan and Nuying, for all I fucking know, and who knows how many others. Want to play alpha male, big brother? Welcome aboard.

  Jeff dropped his hands. He dredged up a weak smile, pinned it in place. Playing himself to the cheap seats once again.

  “Look, you have no idea how deep this goes, Tom. Onbekend’s not just some random thirteen—”

  “Yeah, he’s Merrin’s twin,” Marsalis said flatly. “We already got that far. You had Carmen Ren hold Merrin safe while Onbekend went around leaving genetic trace at crime scenes all over Jesusland and the Rim. Come the right time, Merrin shows up conveniently dead and takes the rap for it all. The question is why? Who were all these people?”

  Jeff closed his eyes. Sighed. “Can I have a drink, please?”

  “No, you can’t have a fucking drink,” said Marsalis. “We just got through agreeing to let you live. Count your fucking blessings and talk.”

  Jeff looked at his brother, pulled a weary face. Norton made the connection—Jeff had to have his props. Cheap-seat appeal.

  “Sure. I’ll get you a drink, Jeff,” he said gently. He met the black man’s disbelieving look, made the tiny raised-hand gesture again. “Where d’you keep it?”

  “Wall cabinet. There’s a bottle of Martell in there and some glasses. Help yourselves.” Jeff Norton turned to look at Marsalis. “He’s got you jumping pretty neatly to the line for a thirteen, hasn’t he?”

  Marsalis looked down at him. A faint frown creased his brow. “You want to get that looked at.”

  “Get what looked
at?”

  Norton looked around from the open bar cabinet just in time to see the black man’s fist snap out from the waist. Short, hard, and full force into Jeff’s nose. He heard the cracking sound it made as the cartilage broke. Jeff bucked and screamed. His hands flew to his face again. Blood streamed out between them.

  “Get that looked at,” said Marsalis tranquilly.

  Norton spotted a box of tissues on the desk. He hooked it up and carried it across to the sofa with the bottle of cognac and a single glass. He set everything down on the coffee table, tugged a tissue loose, and handed it over to his brother.

  “Don’t fuck around, Jeff,” he said quietly. “He wants you dead bad enough to taste, and I’m not that far behind him. Here, clean yourself up.”

  Jeff took the tissue, then a couple more from the box. While he stanched the blood flow from his nose, Norton poured into the single glass. He pushed the cognac across the tabletop.

  “There’s your drink,” he told his brother. “Now make it good.”

  “Scorpion Response,” he told them.

  Carl nodded. “Claw Control. Right. You’re still using the call signs, you sad fuck. What were you, Jeff, backroom support? You sure as fuck weren’t the front end of anything as nasty as Scorpion.”

  “You’ve heard of these guys?” Norton asked him.

  “On the grapevine, yeah. Ghost squad in the Pacific Rim theaters, supposed to be one of the last covert initiatives before the Secession.” Carl looked speculatively down at Jeff Norton. “So let’s hear it, Jeff. What was your end?”

  “Logistics,” the Human Cost director said sulkily. “I was the operations coordinator.”

  “Right.”

  “When the fuck was this?” Norton stared at his brother. “You didn’t even move out here until ’94. You were in New York.”

  Jeff Norton shook his head wearily. “I was out here all the time, Tom. Back and forth, Union to the Rim, Rim to Southeast Asia. We had offices all over. Half the time, I wasn’t home more than one weekend in five.” He took the blood-clotted tissues away from his nose, dumped them on the coffee table, and grimaced. “Anyway, how would you have known? We saw you what, once a month, if that?”

  “I was busy,” said Norton numbly.

  “The way I heard it,” Carl said. “Secession should have been the end of Scorpion Response. Supposed to have been wound up like all the other dirty little bags of deniability the American public didn’t need to be told about. That’s the official version, anyway. But this is the seventies, a good few years before they would have been employing you, Jeff. So what happened? They go private?”

  Jeff shot him a startled look. “You heard that?”

  “No. But it wouldn’t be the first time a bunch of sneak op thugs couldn’t face early retirement and went to the market instead. That what happened?”

  “Scorpion Response were retained.” Jeff was still sulking. More tissues, tugged up from the box on the table. Carl watched him impassively.

  “Retained by who?”

  Norton had the answer for that already. “The Rim States. Got to be. They’ve just cut loose, the Pacific arena’s their future. Anything that gave them an edge had to be worth hanging on to, right?”

  “That’s right, little brother.” Jeff moved the tissues from his nose long enough to knock back a chunk of the cognac. “Starting to see the big picture now?”

  “Toni Montes,” Carl said. “Jasper Whitlock, Ulysses Ward, Eddie Tanaka. The rest of them. All Scorpion personnel?”

  “Yeah. Not those names, but yeah.”

  “And Onbekend.”

  “Yeah.” Jeff Norton’s voice shaded with something. Carl thought it might be fear. “Him, too. Some of the time. He came and went, you know. On secondment.”

  “But not Merrin?”

  The Human Cost director sneered. “Onbekend was Merrin to us. We didn’t know about the other one, no one knew there were two.” He looked down into his glass. “Not until now.”

  Carl paced across the office to the bar. He stared down at the assembly of bottles and glasses. The Bayview tavern mapped itself onto his vision, drinking with Sevgi Ertekin, stolen whiskey from behind the bar, and the stink of gunfire still hanging in the air. He felt the swift skid of anger in his guts, wanted to smash everything in the cabinet, take one shattered bottle by the neck, go back to Jeff Norton with it and—

  “N-djinn search on the victims turned up no connections among them,” he said tonelessly. “Which means you must have used some very high-powered Rim n-djinn capacity of your own to bury these people in their new lives. Now, I can only see one reason why anybody would bother to do that.”

  “You were winding up.” Realization etching wonder into Tom Norton’s tone. “Shutting the whole operation down and scattering.”

  Carl turned back to face the sofa, empty-handed.

  “When, Jeff? When, and why?”

  Jeff Norton glanced across at his brother. “I’d have thought you’d be able to work that one out for yourself, Tom.”

  The COLIN exec nodded. “You came out here, took up the Human Cost job in ’94. They were burying you, too. Had to be sometime around then.”

  Jeff put down his latest clump of bloodied tissue, reached for more. There was a thin smile playing about his lips. A little more blood trickled down into the grin before he could soak it up.

  “Little earlier in fact,” he said. “Thing like that has quite a momentum once it’s rolling, it takes awhile to brake. Say ’92 for the decision, early ’93 to cease operations. And we were all gone by the following year.”

  Carl stepped closer. “I asked you why.”

  The Human Cost director stared back up at him, dabbing at his nose. He seemed still to be smiling.

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “Jacobsen.”

  The name fell off his lips, dropped into the room like an invocation. The era, ’89 to ’94, blazed across his memory in feed-footage flicker. Riots, the surging crowds and lines of armored police, the vehicles in flames. Pontificating holy men and ranting political pundits, UNGLA communiqués and speeches, and behind it all the quiet, balding figure of the Swedish commissioner, reading from his report in the measured tones of the career diplomat, like a man trying to deploy an umbrella in a hurricane. Words swept away, badly summarized, quoted, misquoted, taken out of context, used and abused for political capital. The awful, creeping sense that it did, after all, have something to do with him, Carl Marsalis, Osprey’s finest; that, impossible though it had once seemed, some idiot wave of opinion among the grazing cudlips really did matter now, and his life would be affected after all.

  Jacobsen.

  Oh yes, affected after all.

  Covert heroes to paraded monsters in less than five years. The bleak pronouncements, the bleaker choices; the tracts, or the long sleep and exile to the endless tract of Mars, jostled toward one or the other by the idiot mob, like a condemned man swept forward toward a choice of gallows.

  And the cryocap, chilly and constraining, filling slowly with gel as the sedatives took his impulse to panic away from him, the same way they’d taken his discarded combat gear at demob. The long sleep, falling over him like the shadow of a building a thousand stories tall, blotting out the sun.

  Jacobsen.

  Jeff Norton leaned forward for his glass again. “That’s right, Jacobsen. We weren’t sure what the Accords would actually look like in ’92; it was all still at a draft stage. But the writing was pretty fucking clearly on the wall. Didn’t take a genius to see the way things were going to fall.”

  “But.” Tom Norton, shaking his head. “What’s that got to do with anything? Okay, you had Onbekend. But all these other people—Montes, Tanaka, and the rest. They weren’t variants, they were ordinary humans. You were an ordinary human. Why should Jacobsen have mattered?”

  Carl stood over the Human Cost director and saw, vaguely, the shape of what was coming.

  “It mattered,” he said evenly, “becaus
e of what they were doing. Right, Jeff? It wasn’t the personnel, was it? It was what Scorpion Response did. What was your purview, Jeff? And don’t ask me to guess again, because I will hurt you if you do.”

  Jeff Norton shrugged and drained his cognac.

  “Breeding,” he said.

  His brother blinked. “Breeding what?”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, Tom, what do you think?” Jeff gestured violently, nearly knocked over the bottle. The cognac seemed to have gone to his head. “Breeding fucking variants. Like your friend here, like Nuying. Like everything we could lay our hands on over there.”

  “Over there?” Carl asked from the depths of an immense, rushing calm. “You’re talking about the Chinese mainland?”

  “Yeah.” Jeff kept the tissues loosely pressed to his nose, worked the cork on the bottle one-handed, poured himself another tumblerful. “Scorpion Response had been running covert operations into Southeast Asia and China since the middle of last century. It was their playground, they got in and out of there like a greased dick. The new mandate just meant going in and getting what looked like promising material. Pre-Jacobsen, variant science still looked like the way to go. The Chinese were still doing it full-on, no human rights protest to get in the way, they were getting ahead of the game. We aimed to even up the race.”

  Carl saw the way Tom Norton was looking around the office, dazed, stark disbelief smashed through with understanding.

  “Human Cost. Promising material. You’re talking about people? Jesus Christ, Jeff, you’re talking about fucking people?”

  His brother shrugged and drank. “Sure. People, live tissue culture, cryocapped embryos, lab notes, you name it. Small-scale, but we were into everything. We were a big unit, Tom. Lot of backing, lot of resources.”

  “This is not possible.” Norton made a two-handed gesture as if pushing something away. “You’re telling us Human Cost was…you ran Human Cost as a, as some kind of pirate genetic testing program?”

  “Not exactly, no. Human Cost was the back end, shell charity to cover the operation here in the Rim. It was a lot smaller then, back before we had official state funding, before I came out here to run it officially. Back then it was a guerrilla outfit. Couple of transit houses here and there, some waterfront industrial units down in San Diego. Scorpion Response were the sharp end, gathering the intelligence, going in and getting the goods.” Jeff stared through his brother at something else. “Setting up the actual labs and the camps.”