“Listen, I’ve been thinking. You guys debriefed the onboard djinn for Horkan’s Pride, right? Back in June, when this all started.”
“Yeah.” Her voice stretched a little on the word, quizzical. He liked the sound it made. He fumbled after follow-up.
“Yeah, so who’d you have do it? In-house team?”
She shook her head. “I doubt it. We got transcripts handed down, probably some geek hired out of MIT’s machine interface squad. They handle most of our n-djinn work. Why, you think there’s something they missed?”
“It’s always a possibility.”
A skeptical look. “Something you’d pick up?”
“Okay, maybe not something they missed, as such.” He sipped his coffee. Gestured. “Just something they weren’t looking for, because I wasn’t on the scene. A close link between Merrin and me. Something that’ll put me next to him.”
“A link? You said you didn’t know him.”
“I don’t, directly. Come on, Ertekin, you were a cop. You must know something about complexity theory. Social webbing.”
She shrugged. “Sure. We got the basics in our demodynamics classes. Yaroshanko intuition, Chen and Douglas, Rabbani. All the way back to Watts and Strogatz, all that small-world networks shit. So what? You know, once you get out on the streets for real, most of that demodynamics stuff’s about as useful as poetry in a whorehouse.”
He held back a grin. “Maybe so. But small-world networks work. And the variant thirteen club on Mars is a very small world. As is Mars itself. I may not know Merrin, but I’m willing to bet you can link me to him in a couple of degrees of separation or less. And if those links are there, then nothing’s going to spot them out better than an n-djinn.”
“Yeah. Any n-djinn. Why’s it got to be Horkan’s Pride?”
“Because Horkan’s Pride was the last djinn to see Merrin alive. It stands to reason that—”
Soft chime from the door.
Ertekin glanced at her watch, reflexively. Confusion creased in the corners of her eyes.
“Guess Tom just doesn’t trust the two of us together,” Carl said, deadpan.
The confusion faded out, traded for a disdain he made as manufactured. She crossed to the door and picked up the privacy receiver.
“Yes?”
He saw her eyes widen slightly. She nodded, said yes a couple more times, then hung up. When she looked at him again, there was a fully fledged frown on her face. He couldn’t decide if she was worried or annoyed, or both.
“It’s Ortiz,” she said. “He drove here.”
He covered his own surprise. “What an honor. Does he collect all his new hires by limousine?”
“Not since I’ve been working there.”
“So it must be me.”
He’d intended it to come out light and supple with irony. But somewhere, sometime in the last four months, he’d lost the knack. He heard the weight in his own words, and so did she.
“Yeah.” She looked at him over her coffee mug. “It must be you.”
He’d met Ortiz a couple of times before, but doubted the man would remember him. Both meetings were years in the past, both had been swathed in the glassy-smile insincerity of diplomatic visits, and Carl had been only one of several variant thirteen trackers in a queue of agency staff lined up to press the visiting flesh on arrival. Munich II was in process, there was talk of COLIN coming back to the table to approve the Accords, fully this time, and everyone was walking on eggs. Back then—Carl recalled vaguely, he hadn’t been that interested—Ortiz was a newly recruited policy adviser, fresh from a political career in the Rim States and not yet a major figure in the COLIN hierarchy. Detail had faded, but Carl remembered grizzled hair and a tan, a slim-hipped dancer’s frame that belied the other man’s fifty-something years. A slight lift to the serious brown eyes that might have been Filipino ancestry or just biosculp to suggest the same to voters. A good smile.
For his own part, Carl had been busy enjoying the comforts of his newly reacquired anonymity at the time. The media focus attendant on his rescue and return from Mars and the Felipe Souza had died down, to his relief, the previous year; the celebrity machine, in the absence of any attempt on his part to restoke the fires of its interest, had grown bored with him and moved on. Sure, he’d made it back alive and sane from a nightmarish systems breakdown in deep space, but what else had he done recently? UNGLA was sealed up tight, bureaucratically impassive, not the kind of brightly confected media play the networks liked at all. The high-profile cases were still to come. Meanwhile, some adolescent son of African royalty was up and about on the Euro scene, deploying his Xtrasome capacity at a Cambridge college and his polished-jet good looks in the dj-votional clubs of west London. The Bannister family were settling, amid some local acrimony, into their Union citizenship. A Thai experia star was getting married. And so on. The unblinking media eye rolled away, and Carl felt its absence like the sudden cool of shade from the Martian sun.
They went down to the street. Cold struck through the thin fabric of the S(t)igma jacket he’d blagged in Florida.
Ortiz was waiting for them on the other side of the thoroughfare, leaning against the flank of the COLIN limo in a plain black topcoat and sipping coffee from a stall up the street. Carl could see the yellow-and-black logo repeat, weak holoplay in the bright winter air of the market and again in stenciled micro on the Styrofoam in Ortiz’s hand. Steam coiled up out of the cup and met the frost of the man’s breath as he raised the coffee to his lips. An unobtrusive security exec stood nearby, hands lightly clasped, scanning the façade from behind lens-sheathed eyes.
Ortiz spotted them and stacked his coffee casually on the roof of the limo at his side. As Carl approached, he stepped forward to meet him and stuck out his hand. No wince, no sign of the internal steeling Carl was used to when he made the clasp with someone who knew what he was. Instead, there was a loose grin on Ortiz’s lean bronzed face that shaved years off his otherwise sober demeanor.
“Mr. Marsalis. Good to see you again. It’s been awhile, I don’t know if you’ll remember me from Brussels.”
“Spring ’03.” Carl masked his surprise. “Yeah, I remember.”
Ortiz made a wry face. “What a complete mess that was, eh? Two agendas, worlds apart and steaming steadily in opposite directions. Hard to believe we even bothered talking.”
Carl shrugged. “Talking’s always the easy part. Looks good, doesn’t cost anything.”
“Yes, very true.” Ortiz shifted focus with the polished smoothness of the career politician. “Ms. Ertekin. I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion. Tom Norton told me you’d be coming in, but I felt in view of the. Unpleasantness, it might be as well to provide an escort. And since I was on my way across town anyway…”
You thought you’d swing the opportunity to curry some potential UN favor. Right. Or maybe just gawk at the thirteen.
But underneath the sneer, Carl found himself unable to summon much dislike for Ortiz. Maybe it was the relaxed handshake and the grin, maybe just the contrast with the past four months down in the Republic. He turned to catch Ertekin’s response, see what he could read in her face. The tiger eyes and—
—something invisible splits the air between them.
Carl was moving before he had time to consciously understand why.
—flicker of black motion in the corner of his eye—
He hit Ertekin with crossed arms, bore her to the pavement and crushed her there. One hand groping for a weapon he didn’t have. Over his head, the air in the street erupted in spit-hiss fury.
Magfire.
He heard the coachwork on the limo go first, riddled from end to end—it sounded like a spate of sudden, heavy rain. Someone yelled, grunted as they were hit. Bodies tumbled behind him, dimly sensed. Screams. He was smearing himself on top of Ertekin, casting about for the—