Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “Ortiz,” Norton said harshly, moving a step ahead.

  Ortiz prodded at the chair’s arm controls, and it coasted silently around on the spot to face them. He smiled, a little forcedly.

  “Tom Norton,” he said, as if it were a philosophical question that had been troubling him. “I’m so very sorry to hear about your brother, Tom. I’ve been meaning to call you. And Carl Marsalis, of course. I still haven’t had the chance to thank you for saving my life.”

  “Don’t thank me yet.”

  “Ah.” Something happened to the planes of the ravaged face. “Well, I didn’t imagine that this was a social call.”

  “Jeff talked.” Norton was trembling with the force of what he’d carried inside him across the continent. “Scorpion Response. Wyoming. The whole thing. So don’t you tell me you’re sorry, you piece of shit. You did this, all of it. You’re the reason Jeff is dead.”

  “Am I?” Ortiz didn’t seem to be disputing it. He placed his hands palm-to-palm in his lap, pressed them together, maybe to hold down his fear. “And so you’ve brought your avenging angel with you. Well, that is fitting, I suppose, but I should warn you this chair has—”

  “We know,” Carl said bleakly. “And I’m not here for Norton’s benefit. I came for Sevgi Ertekin.”

  “Ertekin?” A frown crossed Ortiz’s face, then cleared. “Oh yes, the officer you stayed with in Harlem when we had you released. Yes, she died, too, didn’t she. A few days ago. I’m afraid I’ve not been keeping up very closely with—”

  “She didn’t die.” Carl held down the fury with distant, trained reflex. His voice was quiet and cold, like the faint bite of winter in the New York air outside. “Sevgi Ertekin was killed. By your avenging angel, Ortiz. By Onbekend. Merrin. Whatever you call him. She died saving my life.”

  “I am…very sorry about that as well.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “For you? No, I don’t imagine it would be. I assume there was some.” Ortiz frowned. “Some connection between you and this Ertekin.”

  Carl said nothing. The words would take him nowhere.

  “Yes, there must have been. You people care about so little in the end, need so little, of the material world and of other people. But when you do choose to own something or someone, when you consider that something or someone to be yours…”

  “Yes, then,” said Carl. “Nothing else matters.”

  He met the COLIN director’s eyes, saw the way they flinched away.

  “I’m afraid,” said Ortiz shakily, “that events have run rather out of control in my…my absence from the bridge, as it were. Your involvement, Onbekend, other changing factors. Had I not been removed so unexpectedly from managing the operation, perhaps things would not have become so tangled. I truly regret that, you must believe me.”

  “You still would have murdered over twenty men and women,” said Norton violently. “Just to save your political fucking neck.”

  Ortiz shook his head. “No, Tom, that isn’t—”

  “Don’t fucking use my name like we’re friends, you piece of shit!”

  Carl put a hand on Norton’s arm. “Keep it down, Tom. We don’t want your security breaking the door down on us.”

  The COLIN exec jerked away from him, looked at him as if he were contagious. In front of them, Ortiz was talking again.

  “—was not for me, personally. You must understand that. I’m a wealthy man, and I have access to even greater wealth through other channels if I need it. I could have afforded to pay off your brother and his accomplice—”

  Norton stared. “You knew? You knew he was part of it?”

  “I suspected.” Ortiz coughed a little, hunched over in the chair. He cleared his throat. “His story seemed feeble, I thought it was likely he was involved, but…we were once close associates, Tom. Friends, even. You must know I promoted you on his request, just the way I promoted him to Scorpion Response twenty years ago.”

  Norton’s voice came through his teeth. “Am I supposed to be fucking grateful to you now?”

  “No, of course not. That’s not what I’m saying. Listen to me, please. I suspected Jeff, I didn’t know for sure. But I did know that if I unleashed Onbekend on the others, whoever they were, Jeff would fold. If he had been involved, I knew he’d give me no more trouble. Even in the old days, even with Scorpion Response, he was a logistical manager, a facilitator. Not an operative, not a killer. Jeff never had the stomach for those things.”

  Norton grinned savagely down at him. “That’s all you know. My brother sent those skaters to kill you. My brother got me to hire Marsalis out of South Florida State to crank up the pressure on you and Onbekend. He was playing you just like you played him.”

  “Is that so?” An attempted smile wavered on the COLIN director’s face for a moment. “Ironic, then, that he provided both the agents of my death and the means to foil them. Ironic, too, that you, Mr. Marsalis, should both save my life and then bring everything tumbling down around me. But then, that has always been the double-edged blade that your kind offered us, from the very beginning. Variant thirteen, the avatars of purified violence, our saviors and our nemeses.”

  Carl listened to the lilt of imagery in Ortiz’s voice and thought abruptly of Manco Bambarén’s mannered speeches on pistacos and human history. He wondered idly what genes the two men might share.

  “Where is Onbekend?” he asked bluntly.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know.” Maybe Carl twitched forward, because Ortiz’s voice tightened a little with anxiety. “Really, I don’t. Believe me, if I knew—”

  “Jeff Norton said he’d gone back to the altiplano. Back to Bambarén. That’s where you would have contacted him in the beginning to set this up, right?”

  “Yes, but through Bambarén’s organization. In the end, I could only leave messages. It was he who came to me, here in New York one night, like a ghost through the security around my home.” Ortiz stared away through the window and shivered a little. “Like something I had summoned up. I should have known then, all those lessons our myths and legends scream at us, time and again. Never summon up what you cannot control.”

  “You must have had direct contact with him after that,” Carl said pragmatically. “You set him on me in San Francisco, after the Bulgakov’s Cat arrests.”

  Ortiz tried another smile. It guttered and died. “Believe me, Mr. Marsalis, I tried harder than you’ll ever know to prevent that. I am not an ungrateful man, and you had saved my life. But once decided, Onbekend is a force of nature. You had already threatened the object of his affections in Arequipa; he would not take less than your death. I tried to move you out of range, I had UNGLA attempt to recall you, but it seems you are in your way no less stubborn than any other of your kind. You would not shift. And Onbekend was closing on you too fast for me to do anything else.”

  The shock sparked in him. “You had di Palma call me?”

  “Yes, Mr. Marsalis.” Ortiz sighed. “And not only then. From the very beginning, Gianfranco di Palma had instructions to remove you from the proceedings as rapidly as possible. We had simply not expected you to be so tenacious in a fight that was not your own.”

  Carl remembered the UNGLA clinic in Istanbul. Mehmet Tuzcu and his diplomatic attempts at extraction. His own refusal to shift, the weak fistful of reasons he threw out, like sand in his own eyes. But it had always been Sevgi Ertekin, he knew, even then.

  “Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?” he asked distractedly.

  “So it would appear. A curious match, is it not? But then they do at least have in common that they are both objects for the hormonal hatred the rest of humanity seems constantly to need a target for.”

  Norton was dealing with something else, staring at Ortiz. “You’re pulling favors with UNGLA already? You’ve got your hooks in that far?”

  “Tom, I have a secure nomination for secretary general. There will be no dispute, it’s decided at all the levels that matter. I will hold the post by thi
s time next year, if you let me live.” The pressed palms raised, almost like prayer. “Don’t you understand, either of you, that this is what I have been trying to safeguard? You think this was about me personally? It was not, please believe me. I have spent the last six years of my life trying to bend the Colony Initiative closer to a rapprochement with the UN. To reach agreements on Martian law and cooperative governance. To leash corporate greed and harness it to a European social model. To break down the barriers between us and the Chinese instead of building walls and fences. I’ve done all of that in the hope that we don’t have to take our insular nation-state insanities to the first new world we’ve reached and build the same stupid hate-filled structure from the ground up all over again.”

  Ortiz’s face was flushed and animated, passion briefly imitating health while it filled him. Carl watched the COLIN director as if he were something behind glass in an insect vivarium. See the humans. Watch the patriarchal male justify his acts to his fellows and to himself.

  “One more year,” said Ortiz urgently. “That’s all I need, and I can continue that work from the other side of the fence. I can restructure the idiot posturing in the General Assembly, force reforms, make promises, all built on the work I’ve already done here with COLIN. That’s what was under threat from this stupid petty blackmail out of the past—not some quick cash that I could have filtered through a COLIN account for less than the cost of a single nanorack elevator. That’s not why I did this. I did it for the future, a hope for the future. Isn’t that worth the sacrifice? It was a handful of used-up, counterfeit lives, tired, superannuated men and women of violence hiding from their own pasts, set in the balance against the hope of a better future for all of us.”

  Carl thought briefly of Toni Montes, imagined her fighting Onbekend with the decayed vestiges of her combat skill, then letting go and dying to keep the thirteen away from her husband and children. He wondered if she’d thought of smoking ruins in Wyoming as she stood there waiting for the bullet, or only the children she would never see walk through the door again.

  He wondered what he’d have to picture when the time came for him.

  Elena Aguirre, whispering behind him.

  The quiet, filling him up…

  “You’re full of shit, Ortiz.” The rasp of Norton’s voice pulled him out of it. “You didn’t have a problem with using these men and women of violence when you were running Scorpion Response.”

  “No, that’s true, Tom. But it was a different time.” Ortiz, pitching his tone raised but reasonable. Arguing his point in good faith. “You have to remember that. And back then, those men and women themselves would gladly have given their lives in the causes I’m talking about, because they also believed in a better future.”

  Norton jolted forward, face tight with rage. He gripped the arms of Ortiz’s wheelchair, pushed it back half a meter before the autobrake cut in. Carl saw tiny specks of spittle hit Ortiz in the face as the COLIN exec yelled at his boss.

  “A better fucking future? And what exactly was your bright new future going to be, you motherfucker? Covert ops in other people’s countries? Corrupt corporate practice? A genetic concentration camp in Wyoming?”

  Carl pulled him back. “Get a grip, Tom. This isn’t what we’re here for.”

  But the force had already gone out of Ortiz’s face, like a candle flame blown out by Norton’s rage. Suddenly the wheelchair held only an ill old man, shaking his head in weary admission.

  “I…was…young. Foolish. I have no defense. But I believed what we were doing was right, at the time. You have to understand what it was like. In the West we were losing the edge, terrified of the gene research that needed to be done, held back by moral panic and ignorance. China was doing work that our universities and technology institutes should have been pursuing. They still are.” Ortiz shifted his gaze to Carl, grew animated once more. “There is a future on Mars, Mr. Marsalis, but it’s not a human future the way Jacobsen and UNGLA understood it. You’ve been there, you know what it’s like. We will need the variants, we will have to become a variant of some sort if we plan to stay. The Chinese understand this, that’s why they haven’t stopped their programs. I only sought to equalize the pressure, so when the explosion, the realization finally came, it would not rupture our society apart from the differential.”

  Carl nodded. “Yeah. Let’s get back to Onbekend.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “What does it matter what I believe? It won’t change what you’ve done. How did Onbekend find out he was Manco Bambarén’s half brother?”

  Ortiz sighed. “I really don’t remember details of that sort. It was a long time ago. Yes, possibly, he used Scorpion Response time and resources to track down his sourcemat mother, discovered who she was, and saw the angle. The work we were doing in Wyoming may have sparked his interest. It is through Scorpion channels that he discovered he had a twin, that I do know, so quite possibly he found Isabela Gayoso the same way. And I know that when he wasn’t seconded to us, Project Lawman deployed him in a covert capacity in Bolivia on at least one occasion, so he would perhaps have had opportunity then as well. All I can tell you is that when the time came to dissolve the Scorpion operation, he already had his place in the sun prepared. He knew that his twin had accepted Mars resettlement, and that Scorpion Response would be wiped from the flow by n-djinn. And Bambarén had made a place for him in his organization. It was a perfect disappearing act.”

  Yeah, until Stefan Nevant shows up trying to sell Bambarén a pistaco threat he already has blood-related access to and drawing down attention they could really all do without. Poor old Stefan, right on target. Better intuition than you ever knew. No wonder Bambarén turned you over so fucking fast. All you were going to do was lead an UNGLA squad right to his half brother’s door.

  And no wonder Bambarén freaked when we showed up, set it all in motion all over again. I thought I’d offended him when I talked about exemplary executions in some village square somewhere. Must have nailed something Onbekend did for him, too close to the truth for comfort.

  He thought I was playing with him. Thought I’d come for his brother.

  He thought of Sevgi Ertekin, propped against the side of the COLIN jeep, hands in pockets, jacket hooked back. The casual reveal of the shoulder-holstered Marstech gun, the telegraphed warning to Bambarén not to fuck up.

  Sevgi, you should have been here to hear all of this. We were so fucking close after all.

  But you would have told me not to gloat, it’s not attractive.

  He focused hard on the man in the wheelchair. “Is Isabela Gayoso still alive?”

  “No, she died some years ago. Onbekend mentioned it to me in passing when we met in New York. She grew up in crushing poverty, it seems, and of course these things tend to take their toll later in life. From what I hear, Bambarén himself was lucky to survive his childhood. Neither of his siblings did.”

  “Does Bambarén know he has a second half brother?”

  “No. We did not involve him. Onbekend has enough familia presence these days to make the contacts we needed at Bradbury and Wells, and to be convincing when he did. It took some time, but he convinced the Martian chapters that there is a wedge opening between the Lima clans and the altiplano.” Ortiz’s shrunken shoulders lifted under the gray silk of the pajamas. “From what I understand, it’s not far from the truth.”

  “And Merrin never knew who was hiring him, either?”

  “Merrin was never aware that he had a twin in the first place. As I said, it was only through Scorpion Response intelligence that Onbekend discovered what had been done. Merrin never would have had access to the data. And you’ve seen Onbekend; he changed his face when he went underground back in ’94. No resemblance any longer.”

  Carl thought about the echo in the features he’d seen the night Sevgi was shot. “No, there is a resemblance. If you look for it.”

  “Well, as I understand it the actual hiring was filtered through the Mart
ian familia machine anyway. I doubt Merrin and Onbekend ever actually saw each other across the screen. The familias knew only that this was a personal matter, that the people at this end had chosen this particular man, Merrin, and that if they could not recruit him, there would be no deal.”

  “And Merrin?” Norton wanted to know. “What was he told?”

  Another fragile shrug. “That he had friends here on Earth who wanted him back, who would provide him with a new identity and the resources to disappear in comfort. We made it a very attractive package.”

  The COLIN exec shook his head numbly. “So Onbekend just sold out his brother? His twin?”

  “Sacrified him, yes. What of it?” Ortiz gestured. “They had never known each other, never met. What bond could there be?”

  “That’s not the point!” But now Norton was looking at Carl. “He was his brother, for Christ’s sake!”

  “That is the point, Tom,” Carl told him quietly. “Thirteens don’t do abstract allegiance. It’s not part of our makeup.”

  “But…Bambarén.” Norton held out his hands. “That’s an abstract blood tie.”

  Ortiz made an arid chuckling sound. “Yes, one that Onbekend has exploited to great benefit.”

  “Bambarén got used,” said Carl, looking down at Ortiz. “Just like everybody else. Just like Scorpion Response, just like Human Cost. Just like Onbekend and Merrin. You got everybody dancing.”

  “Mr. Marsalis, please understand—”

  Enough.

  Carl grabbed Ortiz under the arms and hauled him out of the chair in a single violent motion. The other man seemed to weigh almost nothing, but that might have been the mesh kicking in, or the rage. Ortiz kicked and struggled, but feebly. Carl held him in what felt for a moment like an embrace, stepped back clear of the panic-wired wheelchair, and laid the COLIN director carefully down on the polished wood floor.