“Right. What we figured, too.” Ertekin backed off a little, ended up close to where Norton was sitting. “If Jasper Whitlock had been another Eddie Tanaka type, you could maybe have sold me on Merrin not finding him first time around, needing to go back. But Whitlock was a medical services broker. All aboveboard, upright citizen, pillar of the community, ran his own business. Not the sort of guy that’s too hard to find. Merrin shot him sitting behind the desk in his own office. So it’s got to be, Merrin didn’t know he had to kill this guy back in June. He found out later.”
“Question is where from?” Carl stared at the continental map, the scattered black flags. “He crosses the border to ice Tanaka, goes all the way to Texas. Any sign that he was after information there?”
“No. Tanaka was strictly a small-time scumbag. Drugs, illicit abortions. The odd smuggled-organ deal.”
Norton looked up from the dataslate, face deadpan. “In fact, the Jesusland version of a medical services broker.”
“Well…”
Ertekin scowled. “We already chased that connection,” she told Carl. “Tanaka’s got no official medical standing, in the Republic or anywhere else. He was a biohazard engineer by trade—”
“Rat catcher,” supplied Norton.
“Unemployed anyway for the last two years, living mostly off a string of women out of El Paso and points east. Before that, Houston, similar profile. Best guess is that’s how he got into the abortion provision in the first place. There’s a lot more money in it than—”
“Catching rats.” Carl nodded slowly. “Right. So I’m looking at this map, we’ve got southeastern Texas, northern Texas, western Oklahoma, then two in Colorado, one suspected in Iowa, Kansas one suspected one dead cert, Ohio, Michigan, two in Illinois, South Carolina suspected, Maryland suspected, Louisiana, Georgia, and northern Florida. Have you got any ties between any of these victims? Anything that gels at all?”
The look on Ertekin’s face was answer enough. She was staring at the map, too, and the scattered faces of the dead.
“He could be getting them out of the phone book for all we know,” said Norton soberly.
CHAPTER 14
The sounds of shouting dragged her awake.
For a confused moment, she thought it was a theft or some excessive haggling down in the market. Then the rhythmic element in the voices made it through the wrap of sleep and she remembered where she was. She sat up sharply in the narrow barrack room bed. The inside of her head felt grimy with the lack of syn. On the other side of the room, dawn was seeping through at the edges of the moth-eaten varipolara curtain; pearl-gray light lay across the ceiling and down the far wall in blurred stripes. She looked at her watch and groaned. The chanting outside was too muffled to make sense of, but she didn’t need to hear the words.
On the table beside the bed, her phone rang.
“Yeah?”
Norton’s voice filtered into her ear. “Hear the fans?”
“I’m awake, aren’t I?”
“Good call, Sev. If we’d stayed in town, we’d be fucked. That nasty cop mind of yours saves the day again.”
“So.” She flapped back the sheet, swung her legs out of bed to the floor. The skin on her thighs goosefleshed in the cool air. “Parris has friends in Tallahassee after all.”
“Better than that.” There was a sour grin in Norton’s voice. “He went to the media feeds. We’re all over Good Morning South.”
“Ah, fuck.” Groping around on the floor with her free hand for clothes. “You think we can still get out of here okay?”
“Well, not by suborb, that’s for sure. Whatever was keeping the lid on Marsalis’s genetic secrets at South Florida State is long gone now. He’s blown. Either Parris talked, or somebody leaked higher up.”
“Got to be Parris.”
“Yeah, well, in any case, now you got Jesuslanders fifty-deep outside both gates and backing up down the access road for a couple of klicks at least. Real Diefor-the-Lord types by the look of it. I just got off the phone to our press liaison in Miami and she tells me there are bible thumpers lining up for airtime from here to Alaska.” She could hear him grinning again. “We’re not just trying to evade Republican justice anymore, Sev. We’re harboring an abomination before the Lord.”
“Great. So what do we do?” Sevgi stuck an arm into a shirtsleeve. “Fly home the old-fashioned way? COLIN’s got to have a couple of flatline Lears down here, right? For short-hop VIPs.”
“I would think so, yes.”
“And they’re not going to shoot us out of the sky when we hit Republic airspace, are they?”
Norton said nothing. Sevgi remembered her profiler cups halfway through seaming her shirt shut. She split the seam back open, peered around on the floor.
“Come on, Tom. You can’t seriously think—”
“Okay, no, they probably won’t shoot us down. But they might force the pilot back to a landing at Miami International and take us off the plane there. We’re not popular in these parts, Sev.”
“Not fucking popular anywhere,” she muttered. She caught the translucent gleam of a p-cup at the foot of the bed. She fished it up between two fingers and pressed it up under the weight of her right breast. “All right, Tom. What do you want to do?”
“Let me talk to Nicholson.” He rode out her snort. “Sev, he may be an asshole, but he’s still responsible for operations. It doesn’t look any better for him than for us if we end up slammed in some Miami jail.”
Sevgi prowled the darkened room looking for the other p-cup. “Nicholson won’t get in a fight at state legislature level, Tom, and you know it. He’s too much of a political animal to upset people with that much clout. If Tallahassee gets in line behind this thing, we’re going to be left twisting in the wind down here.”
Another hesitation. Outside, the sounds of the crowd surged like distant surf. Sevgi found the cup under the bed, dug it out, and fitted it awkwardly, left-handed, under her left breast. She sat on the edge of the bed and started seaming her shirt shut again.
“Tell me I’m wrong, Tom.”
“I think you are wrong, Sev. Nicholson is going to see this as interference with his COLIN Security authority, and at a minimum it’s going to make him look bad. Even if he doesn’t take on Tallahassee directly himself, he’ll kick it upstairs with an urgent-action label attached.”
“And meanwhile, what? We sit tight here?”
“There are more unpleasant places to be stranded, Sev.” He sighed. “Look. Worst-case scenario, you get to spend the day on the beach with your new pal.”
Sevgi took the phone away from her ear and stared at it. The little screen was an innocent matte gray. Norton hadn’t enabled the v-feed. “Fuck you, Tom.”
“It was a joke, Sev.”
“Yeah? Well, next time you’re down on Fifth Avenue, get yourself a new fucking sense of humor.”
She killed the call.
From the landward observation tower, it didn’t look like much. Several hundred variously dressed men and women milling about in front of the facility gate while off to the left a suited, white-haired figure declaimed from behind a portable plastic ampbox podium. A couple of amateurish, hastily scrawled holo-placards tilted about in the air above the crowd. Teardrops and a few old-style IC vehicles were parked back along the access road, and people leaned against their flanks in ones and twos. Early-morning sunlight winked and glinted off glass and alloy surfaces. A couple of helicopters danced in the sky overhead, media platforms by the look of their livery.
It didn’t look like much, but they were a good two hundred meters back from the gate here; the noise was faint, and detail hard to see. Sevgi had worked crowd control a few time as a patrol officer, and she’d learned not to make snap judgments about situations involving massed humanity. She knew how quickly it could turn.