Then he touched the button and, in some way Norton could not define, he seemed to slump.
It was a solid minute before the COLIN exec found words of his own.
“What did you say?” he asked, through dry lips.
Marsalis twitched like someone waking from a doze. Shot him a normal, human look. Shrugged.
“I told him I’d go back to Mars and find him if he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. Told him COLIN would fund the ticket, there and back. Told him I’d kill him and everyone he cares about.”
“You think he’ll buy it?”
The black man’s attention drifted back to the screen. He must also, Norton suddenly realized, be very tired. “Yes. He’ll buy it.”
“And if he doesn’t? If he calls your bluff?”
Marsalis glanced at him again, and Norton knew what the answer was going to be before the quiet, matter-of-fact words fell into the quiet room.
“This isn’t a bluff.”
They waited, down to zero on the glowing counter and then minutes clocking up beyond. Neither of them said anything; Norton at least could think of nothing to say. But the lack was almost companionable. Marsalis met his eye once or twice, and once he nodded as if the COLIN exec had said something, so securely that Norton wondered if he hadn’t in the extremities of his grief and weariness vocalized some random internal thought.
If he had, he couldn’t recall what it was.
The quiet in the room settled in around him like a blanket, warming and soothing, inviting escape, exit from the mess and the grief, the slide down into the soft oblivion of long-deferred sleep…
He jerked awake.
The chime of the receiver, and his neck, cricked and aching.
The screen rezzed up again.
Gutierrez came through, panic-stricken and babbling.
CHAPTER 45
You’re clean.
He couldn’t work out what she meant, not really. He tried. He tugged at the tightly knotted intricacies of it while he sat in a pool of lamplight in the darkened offices at COLIN and played back the transcript of Gutierrez cracking wide open. He gave up exasperated, left it alone. Came back and tugged at it some more.
That leaves you. Carl. You’re clean.
He felt around the rough contours of it, but it was like searching for holds on one of the improbably towering cliff faces in the Massif Verne. Your fingers told you what was there, gave you something to hold on to or lever off, but that was immediate applicability, not the shape of the whole. It wasn’t understanding. He knew the moves that were coming, what That leaves you, you’re clean meant in terms of what she wanted him to do, but that no more told him what she believed about him, what she thought they were to each other, than a successful series of moves back on that Verne rock gave you a topographic map of the face.
It was like being back in the Osprey compound, puzzling over one of Aunt Chitra’s more obscure training koans.
You’re clean.
The phrase ticked in his head like a bomb.
Norton left, presumably to get some sleep before he collapsed. He offered no comment other than See you in the morning. His tone was hesitant, if not friendly then a close analog, buffered soft by exhaustion. Somewhere in the last few hours, the tension between them had shifted in some indefinable way, and something else was emerging to take its place.
Carl sat in the empty offices, listening to the transcript over and over, staring into space, until the floor he was on started to shut itself down for the night. Overhead lighting blinked out panel by panel, and the darkness beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows washed quietly in to fill the work spaces like dark water. Unused systems dropped into standby mode, screens locked to the COLIN acronym, and small red lights gleamed to life in the gloom. No one came up to see what he was doing. Like most COLIN facilities, the Oakland offices were manned around the clock, but by night the staffing went down to skeleton levels and an enabled smart system in the basement. Security was down there—Norton must just have told them to leave him alone.
Gutierrez confessed, hasty and disjointed, backing up, self-correcting, probably lying and embellishing along the way. A picture emerged anyway.
…someone in the familias…had to break ranks sooner or later…the war’s just fucking stupid…
…I don’t know, Marsalis, they didn’t feed me that much fucking information…just had to fake the guy through, that’s what I do, you know… At some point in the protracted, half-hour-gapped interrogation, something tipped over in Gutierrez. Fear, the dangled promise of COLIN protection, maybe some griping sense of betrayal for his time in custody, waiting for a familia rescue that hadn’t yet come—resentment built from smoldering, sparked, and finally flared into open, angry revolt…Look, I’m a fucking cormorant, man, a wire hire, it’s not like I’ve got blood with any of them, why are they going to tell me a fucking thing they don’t have to…
…well, obviously someone who stands to gain from a cessation of hostilities with Mars…you don’t need me to tell you that, right…
…yeah, yeah, jump the docking protocols, put the guy down off the California coast…
…no, they didn’t say why…like I said……yeah, of course I showed him how to jump-start the cryocap gel…how else was he going to survive a splashdown…
And with the resentment, a steadily leaking pool of self-pity and justification…yeah, fucking right, that was an accident. You think I planned to send him home awake like that? Think that’s the kind of work I do from choice? Should have woken up two weeks from home, not from Mars…fucking would have, too, if I’d had my way. I told them it was risky, killing the n-djinn two weeks into the trajectory, told them it might knock on and trigger the other stuff, but hey, why the fuck listen to the expert, what does he fucking know…
…because, if you shut the n-djinn down two weeks from home, COLIN Earth sends a rescue ship up to find out what the fuck happened. Guaranteed. They don’t want to take the risk of a docking fuckup, can’t afford the bad publicity. But if it shuts down two weeks into the trajectory, and then the ship runs silent but smooth all the way home, then they’re going to trust the auto systems and let it go. You know how those fuckers are about costs…
There were a couple of hours of it, even when you cut out the transmission delay. The datahawk’s resistance had gone like a dam wall failing. Carl went back through it, time after time, because the alternative was to start thinking about Sevgi Ertekin. He listened until what Gutierrez was saying started to rub smooth in his head, until it was just patterned noise, with no more meaning than the stamped geometric light and dark of windows, lit and not, in the other buildings outside the window.
He saw her walk back in through the door of the bar once more, wry grimace and the slow ooze of blood on her shoulder and sleeve. The kick in his throat when he saw it, the relief when she said she was okay, the—
…blood, said the transcript for the nth time…. not like I’ve got blood with any of them…
He frowned. Hit pause, rewind. The transcript gibbered backward, rolled again.
Gutierrez sulked once more. Look, I’m a fucking cormorant, man, a wire hire, it’s not like I’ve got blood with any of them…
He heard his own voice and Bambarén’s, worried at by the wind across Sacsayhuamán.
My familiares share a common dislike of your kind, Marsalis. You cannot be unaware of this.
“Yes. You also share a sentimental attachment to ties of blood, but that—