The street was empty, just the way he’d known it would be. Bits and pieces of junk lay unrecovered exactly where they’d fallen. The bicycle wheel sat gaunt and canted, in the gutter. The face-painted woman was gone.
He pivoted about, scanned the street in both directions.
Pale crystalline stages, lit for performance, marching away in both directions. He stood in the pale violet fall of the LCLS, utterly alone. Tilting sense of the unreal. For one fragmented moment, he expected to see Elena Aguirre come drifting toward him over the narrow bands of gloom that interspersed the panels of light.
Come to collect him after all.
CHAPTER 46
They went over it in the garden.
Sevgi Ertekin’s choice: she would not be left out of the briefings. Still my fucking case, she said tightly when Norton protested. Carl guessed it had to be better for her than contemplating what was coming, and she seemed to have either finished or gotten fed up with al-Nafzawi. So they sat in the wooden chairs in the soft sunlight, listened to the brook behind them, and they all acted like Sevgi wasn’t going to die.
“Fucking face-painted,” she exploded, when Carl told them about his encounter the night before. “That bitch did the exact same thing to me back on Bulgakov’s Cat. She slammed into me coming around a support pillar. Had to be her. Why the fuck would she do that?”
“Listening in,” said Carl. “I went over to Alcatraz last night, immediately after. Set off every alarm in the place when I tried to get down to the shielded suites. They took a pinhead mike off my jacket. Size of a bread crumb, chamelachrome casing. Sticks on impact, practically everlasting battery.”
“Then there’ll be one on my clothing, too.”
“Most likely, yeah.”
“So this is Ren, still in the game?” Norton frowned. “That doesn’t make much sense. You’d think she’d be running. Down to the Freeport to get a new ID and a face change.”
Carl shook his head. “She’s smarter than that. Why go for major surgery when you can just slap on a layer of paint and a wig?”
“Yeah,” said Sevgi sourly. “You know how many street entertainers there’s got to be in this city. You see them fucking everywhere.”
“That doesn’t answer the question of what she’s doing hanging around,” Norton pointed out. “If her original assignment was to back Merrin up, then I’d say she’s out of a job.”
“I told you this wasn’t finished,” Carl said. “We took down Merrin a little early, but apart from that, whoever set this thing up is running exactly according to plan.”
Norton gave him a dubious look.
“Yeah, but according to what plan?” Sevgi said. “You say Gutierrez claims he was sending Merrin back as a Martian familia hit man—revenge killings for the enforcement violence back in the seventies. Manco Bambarén gets in on the act because he could use a change of leadership, get the chance to make the most of his relationships with the Initiative corporations. And then instead of taking down the Lima bosses, Merrin goes and hits a couple of dozen random citizens in Jesusland and the Rim. It doesn’t join up at all.”
“Gutierrez thought he was sending back a familia hit man.” Carl geared up for the revelation. “But there’s obviously another agenda here. For one thing, Bambarén’s tied in to this with a lot more than business interests.”
Another cranked eyebrow from Norton. “Meaning?”
“Meaning that Merrin’s genetic donor mother, Isabela Gayoso, is also Manco Bambarén’s real mother. Bambarén and Merrin were brothers. Well, half brothers.”
Sevgi sat upright in her chair, staring.
“No, fucking, way.”
“I’m afraid so. Isabela Rivera Gayoso, slum mother in Arequipa, gave genetic material to a visiting US Army medical unit who were on the scrounge down there with Elleniss Hall Genentech. I think they paid her fifty dollars. She gave her second family name, her mother’s surname, probably because she was ashamed. She also seems to have given a false sin, because the one on record with Elleniss Hall is a dead end. Or maybe they scrambled it somehow. I think back then they weren’t all that fussed about keeping tight records. The whole project was off the books anyway. On paper, Project Lawman didn’t exist.”
“I don’t believe this,” Norton said evenly. “The n-djinn searches would have turned it up.”
“Well, yeah, they might have, if there hadn’t been so much deliberate datafogging going on at the time. Like I told you when I came on board, Sevgi, we were all ghosts back then. Nothing concrete, nothing some overzealous journalist might be able to nail down. And they used early n-djinn technology to do the fogging, so it’s solid. When Jacobsen came along, some of the fog got lifted, but most of the Project Lawman records still belong to the Confederated Republic and they weren’t overly cooperative back when UNGLA were setting up. Our covert research guys are always turning up some fresh dirty little secret the US military buried somewhere and forgot about.”
“If that’s true, then how did you find all this out?”
“I asked one of our covert research guys. He did some digging for me last night, daytime back in Europe, came back to me this morning just before he went to bed. He says it looks like there was some covering at the other end of things as well, cheap datahawk stuff, probably Bambarén trying to bury the unpleasant family history once he got some influence. Having a mother who cooperated with the gringo military, opened her legs for them right up to the ovaries, so to speak—well, it isn’t exactly a good thing to have on your résumé if you’re planning to make it big in the familias down there.”
Norton sniffed. “I still fail to see how this research guy of yours could do something our n-djinns couldn’t.”
“Well, there are a couple of reasons. The first is that I was going in from the far end. Something Bambarén said to me, something about blood, just a feeling I had. I started with the assumption and asked my researcher to chase Gayoso down. I already had my connection. Your n-djinns would have been working the other way, probably off a broad-sweep trawl through the general dataflow with Merrin as their starting point, then a filter for relevance and more detailed follow-up. N-djinns aren’t human, they don’t do cognitive leaps the way we do. Like I said last week, Yaroshanko intuition’s a wonderful thing, but you have to have something to triangulate off. Your n-djinn data trawl’s only as good as your chosen filters, and I’m guessing they were Mars-or Rim-States-related.”
“Yeah, and Lawman-related.”
“Sure, and Lawman-related. But think about what that means—do you really think an n-djinn search running into the Project Lawman protocols is going to pay any attention to genetic source material? You’re talking about people who never met their offspring, never had anything to do with them. In Gayoso’s case, you’re talking about someone who was never even in the same country, never came within a thousand kilometers of the thing they made with her donated ovum. Genetic material is cheap as fuck, even now with Jacobsen in force. Back then, it meant less than nothing. No machine is going to see that as a lead worth pursuing; it never would have made it through the filters for follow-up analysis. You have to already know that the genes Isabela Gayoso handed on to her son are important before you can get the n-djinn to make the link. And like I said, she was never anywhere near him.”
Norton frowned. “Hold it. There was a deployment in Bolivia, wasn’t there? Back in ’88, ’89?”
“’Eighty-eight,” said Sevgi. “Argentina and Bolivia. But it’s disputed, a lot of the data says he might not have been there at all. It’s also got him down as leading a platoon in Kuwait City around the same time.”
“Yeah, but if he was there,” Norton argued, suddenly enthused, “that’d be a point of contact. That’s maybe when Bambarén finds out he’s got a brother he didn’t know about, and…”