“Just go fucking look, will you!”
So he went, left the door ajar and followed Lisa out into the corridor. In the doorway, he paused and turned, looked hard at his brother, pointed at him.
“You stay right there.”
Jeff snorted, rolled his eyes, and reached for the bottle of Martell.
Down the angled corridor, tracking Lisa’s stolid progress, floating behind the eyes with all that he was still trying to assimilate. He wondered vaguely if Marsalis hadn’t gone out into the street as much to clear his head as to keep the call to RimSec clean.
They were almost at the door marked carmel street clinic when the single shot slammed behind them, so flat and undramatic that at first he mistook it for the sound of the door to Jeff’s office, the exit he hadn’t bothered to close.
CHAPTER 51
They had Alvaro Ortiz in a monitored convalescence suite on the newly nanobuilt upper levels at the Weill Cornell Medical Center. He was tagged with microdoc subdermals that would broadcast a scream to the hospital system if his life signs dipped in any way, the receptionist explained with an enthusiastic smile, and he had panic buttons in the bathroom, next to his bed, and on his wheelchair. A full crash team and a dedicated emergency room doctor were retained at all times on idle, specifically for the patients on these levels. Norton thanked her, and they went upstairs. A COLIN Security detachment was on duty outside the suite, two hard-faced men and a woman who met them out of the elevator with professional tension that evaporated when they recognized Norton. Carl let them pat him down anyway, not sure if it was his thirteen status or just procedure that made them do it. The more relaxed they were, the better. Norton told the squad leader not to bother seeing them in, they’d be fine. Mr. Ortiz knew they were coming.
The doors to the suite hummed smoothly back and they walked through. Ortiz was in a wheelchair in the living room, parked by the floor-to-ceiling windows. He wore loose gray silk pajamas, held a book apparently forgotten in his hands, was lost instead in contemplation of the view out across the cubist thickets of the city to the park. He looked thin and breakable in the chair, the tanned face hollowed out to a worn gray, the grizzled hair gone to white in places. He didn’t appear to have heard the door open, and he didn’t turn as they stepped into view from the entryway hall. Carl wondered if he already knew why they’d come.
“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—”