She shook her head wordlessly. They weren’t after Ortiz, she knew inside. Ortiz just got in the way. They were here to kill Marsalis. Kill him before he gets any kind of handle on Merrin.
No reason to share that with Detective Williamson right now.
“And you told patrol you didn’t see the actual fight at all?”
She shook her head again, more definitely this time, getting traction. “No, I said I didn’t see much of it. Much of anything, I was on the ground—”
“Where he threw you, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.” The weight of his body on hers. “He probably saved my life.”
“So he saw them coming?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
Williamson nodded. “I’ll get around to it. Right now, I’m asking you.”
“And I told you I don’t know.”
There was a compressed pause. Williamson started again. “In the statement, you say you think there were three attackers. Or is that just what your twist friend over there told you?”
“No. I saw one take off toward the boulevard.” She indicated the shrink-wrapped corpses of the men Marsalis had killed. The black skater rig was clearly visible through the plastic. “And I can count.”
“Description?”
She looked up at him for a long moment. “Black-clad. Wearing a ski mask.”
Williamson sighed. “Yeah. Okay. You want to tell me about this other guy?”
He gestured at the third bundle on the pavement. The pale, blood-speckled face of Ortiz’s bodyguard gaped up wide-eyed through the plastic. They’d had to roll him onto his back to get Ortiz out from under and onto the wagon, and that was how CSI had wrapped him.
Sevgi shrugged.
“Security.”
“Did you know him?”
“No. Not my section.” It dawned abruptly on Sevgi why Williamson was so edgy. In theory, NYPD held the ground here, but under the Colony Initiative Act, she could take it from them pretty much at will. The sudden sense of the power she had gusted through her like insects in her belly. It wasn’t a clean feeling.
Williamson moved a couple of paces to stand over the dead bodyguard. He stared down at the man’s face. “So this guy covers Ortiz, right?”
“Yes, apparently.”
“Yeah, that’s his job. And our twist friend over there—”
“Do you want to stop using that fucking word?”
It got her a speculative look. The detective came back toward the limo. “All right. Security covers Ortiz. Your genetically modified friend over there covers you. You got any idea at all why he might have done that?”
Sevgi shook her head wearily. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Yeah, I will. But thirteens aren’t known for their honesty.” Williamson paused deliberately. “Or their self-sacrifice. Had to be something in it for him.”
She glared back at the detective, and maybe it was the syn coming on now, but she thought she could have blown Williamson’s head off if she had a weapon at hand. Instead she levered herself to her feet and faced him. “I’m done talking to you, Detective.”
“I don’t think—”
“I said I’m done talking to you.” No maybe about it, it was the syn. The anger drove her forward, but it was the drug that gave her the poise. Williamson was a head taller than she was, but she stood in his personal space as if she wore body armor. As if the last forty minutes hadn’t happened to her. The insulene shawl was puddled around her feet. “Someone a little less fucking Neanderthal, I’d be happy to liaise with. You, I’m done wasting time on.”
“This is a murder investi—”
“Yeah, right now that’s what it is. You want to see how fast I can turn it into a COLIN Security operation?”
His jaw tightened, but he said nothing.
“You back off, Detective, leave me the fuck alone, and you can keep your investigation. Otherwise I’m going to pull the COLIN act on you, and you can go back and tell them at the Twenty-eighth they’ll be losing their jurisdiction.”
Behind the syn, there was a tiny trickle of guilt as she watched Williamson crumble, an empathy from her own years on the other side of the fence.
She crushed it. Crossed the street to Marsalis.
COLIN arrived in modest force about ten minutes later. A secure transit Land Rover rolled quietly into the marketplace, parting the crowds with a low-intensity subsonic dispersal pulse that set Sevgi’s teeth on edge even at distance. She hadn’t called Norton, so someone must have authorized the roll-out when the news about Ortiz broke. The police had been holding back accredited film crews and solo shoulderscope artists in the crowd for a while, and it would be all over the feeds by now.
The Land Rover came to a halt at the edge of the crime scene, with scant regard for the incident barriers the NYPD had strung. One armor-swollen corner of its bodywork broke the bright yellow beams and set off the alarm. Police uniforms came running.
“Subtle,” said Marsalis.
The Land Rover’s forward passenger door cracked, swung open at a narrow angle. Tom Norton stood up on the running board behind it, scanning the crime scene. Even at a distance, Sevgi could see how ashen his face was.
“Sev?”
“Over here.” She waved from the steps of the building, and Norton spotted her. He swung his door wider, stepped down, and closed it again. Brief words with the uniforms in his way, a display of badges, and they opened a path for him. Someone went to shut off the barrier breach alarm, and quiet soaked back into the street. The Land Rover backed up a couple of meters and sat there rumbling like the elegant tank it essentially was. The driver did not emerge.
“Overreacting a bit, aren’t we?” Sevgi asked as Norton reached them.
He grimaced. “Tell that to Ortiz.”
“Is he okay?”
“Relative to what? He isn’t dead, if that’s what you mean. They’ve got him hooked up to half the life-support machines available over at Weill Cornell. Major organ damage, but he’ll have ready stock cultured somewhere. Family’ve been notified.” Norton looked sick as he stared around at the shrink-wrapped corpses. “What the fuck was he doing over here anyway, Sev?”
She shook her head.
“I think he was here to see me,” said Marsalis, rising to his feet for the first time since the assault. He yawned cavernously.
Norton eyed him with dislike. “All about you, huh?”
“NYPD are all over him, Tom,” said Sevgi, defusing. “Detective in charge hardly gave a shit about Ortiz, all he wanted to talk about was how come we’d got an unlicensed thirteen on the streets.”
“Right.” Norton sharpened on the new task. “What’s this detective’s name?”
“Williamson. Out of the Twenty-eighth.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“He’s already been talked to. That’s not what I meant. I think it might play better if we let this look like an attempt on Ortiz.”
“You think it wasn’t?” Norton blinked. He gestured at one of the dead assassins. “Skater crew, Sev. Track the limo through traffic, that’s standard gang operating procedure. Ten, twelve city murders a year the exact same way. What else are you going to make of this?”
Sevgi nodded at Marsalis.
“Oh come on. Sev, you’ve got to be kidding me. We’ve been in town less than a day. Who knew we were here?”
“Makes no sense the other way around, either, Tom. These guys were street. A real ground-level hit squad. What are they doing coming after someone fiftieth-floor like Ortiz? Man wouldn’t know street if it bit him in the ass.”
“It just did,” Marsalis said, deadpan.
Norton spared him a hard look. Sevgi stepped in.
“Look, whatever just went down here, we had more than enough publicity we didn’t need in Florida. Let’s not have a repeat performance. Ask the cops to kill the thirteen angle, make sure the media don’t run it. For public consumption purposes, Marsalis here can be just another heroic COLIN bodyguard, identity protected so that he can continue his good work.”
“Yes,” said Norton sourly. “As opposed to being a dangerous sociopath who hasn’t actually done any work for us at all yet.”