There.
Out of the market, the pitch and panic of the surrounding multitude, three crouched, black-clad forms, and the sashaying gait of skaters. They hugged the stubby electromag spray guns to their bellies, cradled low in both hands as they surfed the crowd. Shoulder work opened their path—Carl saw bystanders shunted aside and sprawling. The mesh made it seem like slow motion. Chloride clarity gave him the lead skater, stance shifting as he lifted the muzzle of the spray gun, eyes wide in the pale skin gap of the black ski mask. Half a dozen meters at most, he was going to make sure of his shot this time.
Carl locked gazes and came up off the floor snarling.
Later, he’d never know if it was the matched stare, the noise he made, or just the mesh-assisted speed that saved his life. Maybe there was the edge of a flinch in the man’s face as he hurtled forward; the ski mask made it hard to tell. By then Carl was already up and on him. Three—count them, one! two! three!—sprinted steps and a whirl of tanindo technique. The blade of his left hand slammed in under the lead skater’s chin; his right just added lift and vectored spin. The two of them went over together in a tangle of limbs. The spray gun dropped and skittered. Carl got on top of the skater and started hitting him in the face and throat.
The other two were sharp. The right wing leapt cleanly over the tumbled bodies in his path, came down tight with a solid plastic smack, and kept going. Carl got a confused glimpse of the landing, too busy killing the lead skater to pay real attention. But he felt the other wingman fuck up the same maneuver and catch one skate on Carl’s raised shoulder as he jumped. The black-clad form went headlong, almost graceful, hit and rolled on the pavement. Controlled impact, he’d be back up any second. The mesh strung moments apart like loops of cabling. Carl hacked down savagely with an elbow one more time and beneath him the lead skater went abruptly limp. As the tumbled wingman got almost back upright, Carl lunged, grabbed up the leader’s electromag, clumsily, left-handed, squirmed sideways, getting line of fire, and emptied the gun.
The magload sounded like seething water as it left the gun. No recoil—thank Christ—and pretty much point-blank. Carl lay, awkwardly braced, and watched the slugs rip into their target. The wing skater seemed to trip forward again, but jerkily this time, no grace in it. He collapsed facedown, twisted once, and didn’t move again.
The electromag’s feed mechanism coughed empty and stopped.
Sound filtered through: voices raised and hysterical weeping. Still frosted into the mesh, Carl heard it as if through a long pipe. He picked himself up warily, still not convinced at a cellular level that the third skater wasn’t coming back. He dropped the empty weapon, walked to the dead wingman. Crouched beside the body and tugged the man’s spray gun free. He checked the load, almost absently, on autopilot now, and surveyed the damage around him.
The limo was a write-off, coachwork pockmarked gray on black with the raking impact of the magfire. The windows were punched through in a couple of dozen places, powdered to white opaque in spiderweb lines around each hole. Incredibly, Ortiz’s coffee stood where he’d parked it, intact and steaming quietly on the roof of the limo. But Ortiz and his security were both down, tangled in each other’s arms and motionless—it looked as if the bodyguard had tried to get his boss to the ground and cover him there. Blood pooling on the molded pavement where they lay suggested he’d failed. Other bodies lay at a distance, shoppers and stall traders caught in the magfire. Ertekin was up on her knees, staring dazedly around at the mess. Her olive skin was smeared sallow with shock.
“Got two of them,” said Carl thickly as he helped her to her feet. “Third one was too fast leaving. Sorry.”
She just stared at him.
“Ertekin.” He flickered fingers in front of her face. “Are you injured? Are you hurt? Talk to me, Ertekin.”
She shook herself. Pushed his hand away.
“Fine.” It was a bare croak. She cleared her throat. “I’m fine. We’d better get. An ambulance. Get these people…”
She shook herself again.
“Who? Did you see…?”
“No.” Carl stared away in the direction the last skater had disappeared. He could feel a decision stealing over him like ice. “No, I didn’t. But right after the meat van gets here, I think you’d better take me in to COLIN so we can start work and find out.”
CHAPTER 19
Sevgi was still shaking when the cops showed up. She felt an odd shame when the detective in charge, a lean dark man with hard bones in his face, finished talking with patrol and made his way across to her. He was bound to notice. Wrapped in an insulene recovery shawl, seated in the open rear door of the murdered limo and watching CSI go about their business, she felt drenched in her civilian status.
“Ms. Ertekin?”
She looked up bleakly. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“Detective Williamson.” He flipped his left palm open. The NYPD holo twisted to blue-and-gold life, glistened at her like lost treasure. “I’d like to ask you some questions, if you’re feeling up to it.”
“I’m fine.” She’d taken the syn that morning, in the shower, but it wouldn’t have kicked in yet even on an empty stomach. She groped after conventional resources, pulled herself together with a shiver. “I used to be on the force, I’m fine.”
“That so?” Polite, speculative. Williamson didn’t want to be her buddy. She could guess why.
“Yeah, eleven years. Queens, then Midtown Homicide.” She managed a shaky smile. “You guys are from the Twenty-eighth, right? Larry Kasabian still attached there?”
“Yeah, Kasabian’s still around, I think.” No warmth in the words. He nodded at Marsalis, who sat starkly on the steps of the building in his South Florida State inmate jacket, watching the crime scene squad go about their business as if they were a stage play put on for his benefit. “Patrol says you told them this guy’s a thirteen.”
“Yes.” She was cursing herself for it now. “He is.”
“And.” Brief hesitation. “Is that filed with anyone here in the city?”
Sevgi sighed. “We got in late last night. He’s a technical consultant for COLIN Security, but we haven’t had time to notify anybody yet.”
“All right.” But it clearly wasn’t all right. Williamson’s expression stayed cool. “I’m not going to pursue that, but you need to get him registered. Today. Is he, uh, staying with you?”
The implication sneered beneath the words. It felt like a slap. It felt like her father’s tirade when he found out about Ethan. Sevgi felt her own expression tighten.
“No, he’s not uh, staying with me,” she parodied. “He’s uh, staying in COLIN-account accommodation, just as soon as we can find him some. So do you think we can maybe just shelve the fucking Jesusland paranoia. And maybe get on with the police work at hand? How’d that be?”
Williamson’s eyes flared.
“That’d be just fine, Ms. Ertekin,” he said evenly. “The police work at hand is that this twist just killed two armed men in broad daylight, empty-handed, and he doesn’t appear to have a scratch on him. Now, maybe this is just my paranoia running away with me, or maybe it’s just good old-fashioned cop instinct, but something about that doesn’t chime in time.”
“He’s carrying a Mars environment systemic biohoist. And he was combat-trained from age seven up.”
Williamson grunted. “Yeah, I heard that about them. Bad to the bone, right? And you don’t think the men he killed here were combat-proficient.”
“You do?” Sevgi rapped her knuckles on the slug-riddled coachwork at her side. “Come on, Williamson, look at this shit. Combat-proficient? No, they just had guns.”
“Any reason you can think of that someone would send a low-grade spray-for-pay crew after a COLIN executive?”