Her eyes narrowed. “That’s quite an assumption you’re making there, Mr. Marsalis.”
“Is it?” He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not known for my flower arranging. But let’s see if I’m assuming wrong, shall we? At a guess you want someone tracked down. Someone like me. That’s fine, that’s what I do. The only part I’m unclear on is if you want me to bring him in alive or not.”
“We are not assassins, Mr. Marsalis.”
“Speak for yourself.”
She felt the old anger flare. “You’re proud of that, are you?”
“You’re upset by it?”
She looked down at the unfolded dataslate and the text printed there. “In Peru, you shot an unarmed and injured woman in the back of the head. You executed her. Are you proud of that, too?”
Long pause. She picked up his stare and held it. For a moment, she thought he would get up and walk out. Half of her, she realized, hoped he would.
Instead, he switched his gaze abruptly to one of the high-placed windows in the waiting room. A small smile touched his lips. Went away. He cleared his throat.
“Ms. Ertekin, do you know what a Haag gun is?”
“I’ve read about them.” In NYPD communiqués, urging City Hall to issue tighter gun control guidelines before the new threat hit the streets. Scary enough that the initiatives passed almost without dispute. “It’s a bioload weapon.”
“It’s a little more than that, actually.” He opened his right hand loosely, tipped his head to look at it as if he could see the gun weighed there in the cup of his palm. “It’s a delivery system for an engineered immune deficiency viral complex called Falwell Seven. There are other loads, but they don’t get a lot of use. Falwell is virulent, and very unpleasant. There is no cure. Have you ever watched someone die from a collapsed immune system, Ms. Ertekin?”
In fact, she had. Nalan, a cousin from Hakkari, a onetime party girl in the frontier bases where Turkey did its proud European duty and buffered the mess farther east. Something she caught from a UN soldier. Nalan’s family, who prided themselves on their righteousness, threw her out. Sevgi’s father spat and found a way to bring her to New York, where he had clout in one of the new Midtown research clinics. Relations with family in Turkey, already strained, snapped for good. He never spoke to his brother again. Sevgi, only fourteen at the time, went with him to meet a sallow, big-eyed girl at the airport, older than her by what seemed like a gulf of years but reassuringly unversed in urban teen sophistication. She still remembered the look on Nalan’s face when they all went into the Skill-man Avenue mosque through the same door.
Murat Ertekin did everything he could. He enrolled Nalan in experimental treatment lists at the hospital, fed her vitamin supplements and tracker anti-virals at home. He painted the spare room for her, sun-bright and green like the park. He prayed, five times a day for the first time in years. Finally, he wept.
Nalan died anyway.
Sevgi blinked away the memory; fever-stained sheets and pleading, hollow eyes.
“You’re saying you did this woman a favor?”
“I’m saying I got her quickly and painlessly where she was going anyway.”
“Don’t you think that should have been her choice?”
He shrugged. “She made her choice when she tried to jump me.”
If she’d doubted what he was at all, she no longer did. It was the same unshakable calm she’d seen in Ethan, and the same psychic bulk. He sat in the chair like something carved out of black stone, watching her. She felt something tiny shift in her chest.
She tapped a key on the dataslate. A new page slid up on the display.
“You were recently involved in prison violence. A fight in the F wing shower block. Four men hospitalized. Three of them by you.”
Pause. Silence.
“You want to tell me your side of that?”
He stirred. “I would think the details speak for themselves. Three white men, one black man. It was an Aryan Command punishment beating.”
“Which prison staff did nothing to prevent?”
“Surveillance in the showers can be compromised by steamy conditions. Quote unquote.” His lip curled fractionally. “Or soap jammed over lenses. Response time can be delayed. By extraneous factors, quote unquote.”
“So you felt moved to intervene.” She groped around for motivations that would have fit Ethan. “This Reginald Barnes, he was a friend of yours?”
“No. He was a piece-of-shit wirehead snitch. He had it coming. But I didn’t know that at the time.”
“Was he genetically modified?”
Marsalis smirked. “Not unless there’s some project somewhere I haven’t heard of for turning out brainless addictive-personality fuckups.”
“You felt solidarity because of his color, then?”
The smirk wiped away, became a frown. “I felt I didn’t want to see him arse-fucked with a power drill. I think that’s probably a color-neutral preference, don’t you?”
Sevgi held on to her temper. This wasn’t going well. She was gritty with the syn comedown—no synaptic modifiers permitted in Jesusland, they’d taken them off her at the airport—and still fuming from the argument she’d lost with Norton in New York.
I’m serious, Sev. The policy board’s all over this thing now. We’ve got Ortiz and Roth coming down to section two, three times a week—
In the flesh? What an honor.
They’re looking for progress reports, Sev. Which means reports of progress, and right now we don’t have any. If we don’t do something that looks like fresh action, Nicholson is going to land on us with both feet. Now, I’ll survive that. Will you?
She knew she wouldn’t.
October. Back in New York, the trees in Central Park were starting to rust and stain yellow. Under her window as she got ready for work each day, the market traders went wrapped against the early-morning chill. The summer had turned, tilted about like a jetliner in the clear blue sky above the city, sunlight sliding cold and glinting off its wings. The warmth wasn’t gone yet, but it was fading fast. South Florida felt like clinging.
“How much has Norton told you?”
“Not much. That you have a problem UNGLA won’t help you with. He didn’t say why, but I’m guessing it’s Munich-related.” A sudden, unexpected grin that dropped about a decade off his seamed features. “You guys really should have signed up to the Accords like everybody else.”
“COLIN approved the draft in principle,” said Sevgi, feeling unreasonably defensive.
“Yeah. All about that principle, wasn’t it. Principally: you don’t tell us what to do, you globalist bureaucrat scum.”
Since he wasn’t far wrong, she didn’t argue the point. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“No. I’m freelance. My loyalties are strictly for sale. Like I already said, just tell me what you want me to do.”
She hesitated a moment. The dataslate had an integral resonance scrambler built to COLIN specs, which made it tighter than anything any lawyer had ever carried into an interview room at South Florida State. And Marsalis was pretty clearly desperate for an out. Still, the habit of the past four months was ingrained.
“We have,” she said finally, “a renegade thirteen on our hands. He’s been loose since June. Killing.”
He grunted. No visible surprise. “Where’d he get out of? Cimarron? Tanana?”
“No. He got out of Mars.”
This time she had him. He sat up.
“This is a completely confidential matter, Mr. Marsalis. You need to understand that before we start. The murders are widely distributed, and varied in technique. No official connection has been made among them, and we want it to stay that way.”
“Yeah, I bet you do. How’d he get past the nanorack security?”
“He didn’t. He shorted out the docking run and crashed the vessel into the Pacific. By the time we got there, he was gone.”
Marsalis pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. “Now, there’s an idea.”