“Did you kill him?” Ertekin asked sharply.
“No. I tracked him to some friends he had in Arequipa, pulled the Haag gun on him, and he put his hands in the air sooner than die.”
“Bit unusual for a thirteen, isn’t it?” Norton cranked an eyebrow. “Giving up like that?”
Carl matched the raised brow, deadpan. “Like I said, he’s a smart guy.”
“Okay, so you busted this Nevant, this smart guy, and you took him back.” Ertekin got to her feet and went to stare out the window. He guessed she could see where this was going. “So where is he now?”
“Back in the system. Eurozone Internment Tract, eastern Anatolia.”
“And you want to go and talk to him there.” It wasn’t a question.
“I think that’ll be more effective than a v-link or a phone call, yes.”
“Will he see you?” Still she didn’t turn around.
“Well, he doesn’t have to,” Carl admitted. “The Eurozone internment charter guarantees his right to refuse external interviews. If this were an official UNGLA investigation, we could maybe bring some pressure to bear, but on my own I don’t carry that kind of weight. But you know, I think he’ll see me anyway.”
“You basing that on anything at all?” asked Norton.
“Yeah, previous experience.” Carl hesitated. “We, uh, get on.”
“I see. A few years ago you bust the guy, send him back to a lifetime in the Turkish desert, and as a result you’re the best of friends?”
“Anatolia isn’t a desert,” said Ertekin absently, still at the window.
“I didn’t say we were the best of friends, I said we get on. After I busted him, we had to kill a few days in Lima, waiting for transfer clearances. Nevant likes to talk, and I’m a pretty good listener. We both—”
A phone chirruped from Norton’s desk on the other side of the office. He shot a last glance at Carl, then strode across to answer the call. Ertekin turned from the window and nailed Carl with a mistrustful look of her own.
“You think I should let you back across the Atlantic at this point?”
Carl shrugged. “Do what you like. You want to pursue another line of inquiry, be my guest and dig one up. But Nevant’s the obvious lead, and I don’t think he’ll talk to me in virtual, because a virtual identity can be faked. Tell the truth, I wouldn’t trust it in his place, either. Us genetic throwbacks don’t like advanced technology, you know.”
He caught the momentary twitch of her mouth before she locked the smile reflex down. Norton came back from the phone call, and the moment slid away. The COLIN exec’s face was grim.
“Want to guess?” he asked.
“Merrin’s holed up in the UN building with a nuclear device,” suggested Carl brightly. “And enough delegates held hostage to eat his way through to Christmas.”
Norton nodded. “I’m glad you’re having a good time. Wrong guess. You’re all over the feeds. Thirteen saves COLIN director, slaughters two.”
“Oh fuck.” Ertekin’s shoulders slumped. “All we needed. How the hell did that happen?”
“Apparently, some anal little geek at one of the city feeds had a fit of total recall. Got our friend here’s face off the crime scene footage, face reminded him of something, he matched it with the trouble down in Florida.” Norton pointed. “Or maybe it was that jacket. Hard to miss, and it’s not exactly high fashion. Anyway, the geek rings up the Twenty-eighth Precinct and asks some leading questions. Evidently he got lucky. He talked to either someone really cooperative or someone really dumb.”
“Fucking Williamson.”
Norton shrugged. “Yeah, or whoever. You’ve got to bet half an hour after Williamson got back to the Twenty-eighth, every cop in the precinct house knew they had a thirteen walking the streets. And probably saw no reason on Earth to shut up about it. In their eyes, it’s a basic public safety issue. They know they’ve got no leverage with us, they’d be more than happy to let the feeds do their demonizing for them.”
“Demonize?” Carl grinned. “I thought I was up there for saving Ortiz.”
“And slaughtering two,” said Ertekin wearily. “Don’t forget that part.”
“They’re asking for a statement, Sev. Nicholson says he figures you’re it. Former NYPD detective and all that, should make it easier to play down any anti-COLIN feeling the Twenty-eighth may have stirred up.”
“Oh thanks, Tom.” Ertekin threw herself back into her chair and glared up at Norton. “A fucking press conference? You think I haven’t got anything better to do than talk to the fucking media?”
Norton spread his hands. “It isn’t me, Sev. It’s Nicholson. And the way he sees it, no, you don’t have anything better to do right now. What do you want me to do, tell him you had to go out of town?”
Carl met her eyes across the room. He grinned.
part III. AWAY FROM IT ALL
The limited brief of this report notwithstanding, it is imperative to acknowledge that we are dealing here with actual human beings and not some theoretical model of human behavior. We should not then be surprised to encounter a complex and potentially confusing mass of emotional factors and interactions. Nor should it perplex us to discover that any genuine solution may well need to be sought beyond the current scope of our inquiry.
CHAPTER 22
COLIN Istanbul was on the European side, up near Taksim Square and nestled amid a forest of similar purple or bronze glass towers inhabited mostly by banks. At night, a skeleton security staff and automated guns kept the base levels open, lit in pools of soft blue, for whatever business might crop up. The Colony Initiative, to paraphrase its own advertising hype, was an enterprise on which the sun never set. You never knew when or where it might need to flex itself fully awake and deploy some geopolitical muscle. Best always to remain on standby. Sevgi, who associated Taksim primarily with the murder of her grandfather and great-uncle by overzealous Turkish security forces, stopped in just long enough to collect keytabs for one of the COLIN-owned apartments across the Bosphorus in Kadiköy. Pretty much anything else she needed, she could access through her dataslate. Talking to Stefan Nevant was in any case not going to be a COLIN gig.
The less official presence he can smell on you, the better, Marsalis told her. Nevant’s special, he’s one of the few thirteens I know who’s come to an accommodation with external authority. He’s emptied out his rage. But that doesn’t mean he feels good about it. Be best if we don’t poke a finger in that particular blister.
The same limo that had collected them from the airport rolled them down to the Karaköy terminal, where the ferries to the Asian side ran all night. Sevgi shrugged off the driver’s protests about security. Riding around via the bridge was going to take as long as or longer than waiting for the ferry, and she needed to clear her head. She hadn’t wanted to come here, wanted still less to be here with Marsalis. She was beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t have folded and taken the press conference after all.
They’d watched it broadcast on New England Net while the midafternoon THY suborb spun them up from JFK and dropped them on the other side of the globe, Norton looking sober and imposing in his media suit. TV audiences still loved a solid pair of shoulders and a good head of hair above pretty much anything they’d actually hear coming out of a speaker’s mouth, and Tom Norton excelled in both areas. He really could, Sevgi was convinced, have run for office of some sort. He fielded the questions with exactly the right measure of patrician confidence and down-home good humor.
Dan Meredith, Republic Today. Is it true COLIN are now employing hypermales as security?
No, Dan. Not only is it not true, it’s also deeply flawed as an assumption. Inclusive gesture to the whole room. I think we’re all aware what a hypermale would look like, if anyone was actually criminally stupid enough to breed one.