“Uh, yeah.”
“Lovely, isn’t she. You know, sometimes I’ll come out here and talk to her just for the fun of it.”
Norton looked at the ’face. She smiled up at the two of them, head lifted, expression gone very slightly vacant, as if what they were saying was birdsong, or a played segment of some symphony she liked.
“Need to talk to you,” he said uncomfortably.
“Sure.” Jeff Norton gestured. “Come on through. Bye, Sharleen.”
“Good-bye.”
She smiled over her shoulder as they left, then swiveled and sat immobile and silent as they passed out of trigger range. Jeff led him past the reception island and down a truncated corridor with a watercooler at the end. Half a dozen steps along, the passageway grayed out around them and became Jeff’s office. It was pretty much as Norton remembered the actual suite from a visit a couple of years back, a few décor differences in the pastel shades of the walls and fittings, maybe one or two ornaments on shelves that he didn’t recall. A photo of Megan on the desk. He drew a compressed breath and seated himself on the right-angled sofa facing the window and the skyline view of Golden Gate Park. His brother leaned across the desk and punched something out on the deck.
“So?”
“I need some more advice. You heard about Ortiz?”
“No.” Jeff leaned against the side of his desk. “What’s he up to, more UN handholding tours?”
“He’s been shot, Jeff.”
“Shot?”
“Yeah. It’s all over the feeds. Where have you been? I thought you’d know. I gave a COLIN press conference all about it yesterday afternoon.”
Jeff sighed. Shook his head as if it weren’t working properly. He crossed to the adjacent angle of the sofa and collapsed into it.
“Christ, I’m tired,” he muttered. “Been on this Wenzhou thing for the last day and a half solid. I didn’t even go home from the office last night. Been in virtual most of this morning. Is he still alive?”
“Yeah, holding up. They’ve got him wired into intensive-care life support over at Weill Cornell. Medical n-djinn says he’s going to be okay.”
“Can he talk?”
“Not yet. They’re going to patch him into a v-format once he regains consciousness, but that might be awhile.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Jeff gave him a haggard look. “So what’s this got to do with me? What do you need?”
“For Ortiz, nothing. I don’t think you could help right now anyway. Like I said, he’s not even conscious. They’ve got family and close friends at the hospital but—”
His brother gave him the corner of a smile. “Yeah, I know. Not my world anymore. Blew my chance at the Union power game, didn’t I.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Ran west and ended up a bleeding-heart charity chump.”
Norton gestured impatiently. “That’s not what this is about. I want to talk to you about Marsalis. You know, the thirteen we levered out of South Florida State?”
“Oh. Right.” Jeff rubbed at his face. “So how’s that working out?”
Norton hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“You got problems with him?”
“I don’t…” He lifted his hands. “Look, the guy signed up okay. You were right about that much.”
“What, that he’d bite your hand off for the chance to get out of a Jesusland jail?” Jeff shrugged. “Who wouldn’t?”
“Yeah, well I guess I owe you for the suggestion. And I’ve got to say, he lives up to the hype. He was there when they tried to hit Ortiz, and it looks like this guy’s the only reason Ortiz is still breathing. He took out two of the three shooters and chased the third one off. Unarmed. You believe that?”
“Yes,” said Jeff shortly. “I do believe that. I told you, these guys are fucking terrifying. So what’s the problem?”
Norton looked at his hands. He hesitated again, then shook his head irritably and raised his eyes to meet his brother’s curious gaze.
“You remember I told you I’ve got a partner now? Ex-NYPD detective, a woman?”
“Who you want to get horizontal with, but won’t admit it. Yeah, I remember.”
“Yeah, well, there’s something I didn’t tell you about her. She had a relationship with a renegade thirteen a few years back. Didn’t work out, and there were some, uh, complications.”
Jeff raised his brows. “Uh-oh.”
“Yeah. I didn’t give it much thought, even when we hired this guy.”
“Bullshit.”
Norton sighed. “Okay, I gave it some thought. But you know, I figured, she’s tough, she’s smart, she’s got a handle on the situation. Nothing to worry about.”
“Sure.” Jeff leaned forward. “So what are you worrying about?”
Norton stared around the office miserably. “I don’t know.” He threw up his arms. “I don’t know, I don’t fucking know.”
His brother smiled, sighed.
“You ever chew coca leaves, Tom?”
Norton blinked. “Coca leaves?”
“Yeah.”
“What has that got—”
“I’m trying to help here. Just answer the question. You ever chew coca leaves?”
“Of course I have. Every time we have to go down to the prep camps for a Marstech swoop, they give us a big bag at the airport and recommend it for the altitude. Tastes like shit. So what has that got to do with—”
“Do you get high when you chew coca?”
“Oh come on—”
“Answer the question.”
Norton set his jaw. “No. I don’t get high. Sometimes your mouth goes numb, but that’s it. It’s just to give you energy, stop you feeling tired.”
“Right. Now listen. That energizing effect is part of an evolved working relationship between humans and the coca plant. Coca gives humans medicinal benefits, humans ensure that there’s plenty of coca being cultivated. Everybody wins. And human physiology copes very comfortably with the effects the leaf provides. It’s a benefit that doesn’t interfere with any of your other necessary survival dynamics. You’re not going to do anything stupid just because you’re chewing those leaves.”
“Why is it,” Norton asked heavily, “that every time I come to you for help, you have to lecture me?”
Jeff grinned at him. “Because I’m your older brother, stupid. Now pay attention. If you extract the alkaloid from the coca leaf, if you take it through the artificial chemical processes that give you cocaine, and then you slam that stuff into the human brain, well, then you’re going to see a whole different story. You do a couple of lines of that shit, and you surely will get high. You’ll also probably do some stupid things, things that might get you killed in a more unforgiving evolutionary environment than New York. You won’t pay attention to the social and emotional cues of the people around you, or you’ll misread them. Fail to remember useful personal detail. You’ll maybe hit on the wrong woman, pick a fight with the wrong guy. Misjudge speeds, angles, and distances. And long-term, of course, you’ll put your heart under too much strain as well. All good ways to get yourself killed. What it comes down to is that we’re not evolved to deal with the substance at the level our technology can give it to us. Age-old story, same thing with sugar, salt, synadrive, you name it.”
“And variant thirteen,” Norton said drearily.
“Right. Though this is a software issue we’re talking about now, rather than a hardware problem. At least to the extent that you can make that distinction when it comes to brain chemistry. Anyway, look—by all the accounts I’ve read, the Project Lawman originators reckoned that variant thirteens would actually have been pretty damn successful in a hunter-gatherer context. Being big, tough, and violent is an unmitigated plus in those societies. You get more meat, you get more respect, you get more women. You breed more as a result. It’s only once humans settle down in agricultural communities that these guys start to be a serious problem. Why? Because they won’t fucking do as they’re told. They won’t work in the fields and bring in the harvest for some kleptocratic old bastard with a beard. That’s when they start to get bred out, because the rest of us, the wimps and conformists, band together under that self-same kleptocratic bastard’s paternal holy authority, and we go out with our torches and our farming implements, and we exterminate those poor fuckers.”