And then it was like the hard evercrete steps they’d taken up to Moda, steep and stiff breathing and no speech at all on the long, steady climb together to the top.
CHAPTER 28
“He did what?”
Norton glowered out of the screen at her, disbelief and anger struggling for the upper hand on his face.
“Ended up in a fight with Nevant,” said Sevgi patiently. “Relax, Tom, it’s already happened. There’s nothing anybody could have done.”
“Yes there is. You could have refused to let him have his way.”
“Let him have his way?” She felt the faint stain of a blush start in her neck. All the places Marsalis had bitten softly into her flesh were suddenly warm again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means Marsalis suddenly decides he needs to fly out to the other side of the globe, and you just lie down for it. Our cannibal friend is killing people in America, not Europe. I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that Marsalis is looking for a way to get home without fulfilling his contract.”
“Yes, that occurred to me, Tom. Quite awhile ago in fact, back when you were happy to stick him in an unguarded New York hotel for the night.”
Pause. “As I recall, I was going to put him up at my place.”
“Whatever, Tom. The point is, we hired Marsalis to do a job. If we aren’t going to trust him to do it, then why did we bother springing him in the first place?”
Norton opened his mouth, then evidently thought better of what he was going to say. He nodded. “All right. So having beaten up Nevant, what does our resident expert want to do now?”
“He’s talking about Peru.”
“Peru?”
“Yes, Peru. Familias andinas, remember. He got leads from Nevant that point back to the altiplano, so that’s where we need to go.”
“Right.” He cleared his throat. “So, Sevgi, you think we’re actually going to do any investigating at all in the places the crimes are being committed? You know, I was never a cop, but—”
“Fuck it, Tom.” She leaned into the screen. “What’s wrong with you? This is the twenty-second century. You know, global interconnection? The integrated human domain? We can be in Lima in forty-five minutes. Cuzco a couple of hours later at worst. And back in New York before the end of the day.”
“It is the end of the day,” said Norton drily. “It’s past midnight here.”
“Hey, you called me.”
“Yeah, because I was getting kind of alarmed at the silent running, Sev. You’ve been gone two days without a word.”
“Day and a half.” The retort was automatic, but in fact she wasn’t sure who was closer. Her sense of time was shot. Crossing the Bosphorus seemed weeks in the past, New York and Florida months before that.
Norton didn’t seem disposed to argue the toss, either. He glanced at his watch, shrugged.
“Fact remains. You stay gone much longer, Nicholson and Roth are going to start barking.”
She grinned. “So that’s what you’re pissed about. Come on, Tom. You can handle them. I saw the press conference. You played Meredith and Hanitty like a pair of cretins.”
“Meredith and Hanitty are a pair of cretins, Sev. That’s the point. Whatever you say about Nicholson, he’s not stupid, and he’s our boss, and that goes double for Roth. They won’t wear this for long. Not without more payback than your new playmate’s hunches.” Norton’s gaze flickered across the quadrants of the screen, scanning the space over her shoulders. “Where is wonderboy, anyway?”
“Asleep”—she caught herself—“I’d guess. It’s a pretty antisocial hour here as well, you know.”
In fact, when the phone rang, she’d rolled over in the bed and felt a shivery delight as she found the bulk of him there at her side. The frisson turned into a jolt as she saw, at a distance of about ten centimeters, that he was awake, eyes open and watching her. He nodded in the direction of the ringing. COLIN apartment, he said, I figure that’s for you. She nodded in turn, groped over the side of the bed for her T-shirt, and sat up to pull it over her head. She could feel his eyes on her, on the heavy swing of her breasts as she completed the move, and it sent another quiver of jellied warmth through her. The feeling stayed as she blundered out to the phone.
“On COLIN’s endeavor, the sun never sets,” quoted Norton, deadpan. “Anyway, if you’re going to Peru, you’ll need an early start.”
“Have you talked to Ortiz?”
He grew somber. “Yeah, earlier today. They put him through to a v-format for about ten minutes. Doctors won’t run it for longer than that, they say the mental strain’s the last thing he needs. They’ve got nanorepair fixing the organ damage, but the slugs were dirty, some kind of trace carcinogen, and it’s fucking up the new cell growth.”
“Is he going to die?”
“We’re all going to die, Sev. But from this, no, he won’t. They’ve got him stabilized. Still a long road out, but he’ll make it.”
“So what did he say, in the virtual?”
A grimace. “He told me to trust your instincts.”
They got a late-morning suborb to La Paz—like most nations aligned with the Western Nations Colony Initiative, Turkey ran connections to the altiplano hubs every couple of hours. Sevgi had the COLIN limo pick them up at the door. No leisure to ride the ferries this time around.
“We could have waited for the Lima hook,” Marsalis pointed out as they neared the airport at smooth, priority-lane speed. “Less rush that way. I’d have time to buy those clothes you were bitching about.”
“I’m under instructions to rush,” she told him.
“Yeah, but you know there’s a good chance Bambarén might be in Lima, anyway. He does a lot of business down the coast.”
“In that case, we’ll go there.”
“That’ll take some time.”
She gave him a superior grin. “No, it won’t. You’re working for COLIN now. This is our backyard.”
To underline the point, she had a reception detachment meet them at the other end. Three unsmiling indigenas, one male, two female, who brought them out of the terminal with hardened, watchful care to where an armored Land Rover waited under harsh lighting in the no-parking zone. Beyond was soft darkness, a smog-blurred moon and the vague bulk of mountains rising in the distance. As soon as they were all inside the Land Rover, the female operative gave her a gun—a Beretta Marstech, with two clips and a soft leather shoulder holster. She hadn’t requested it. Welcome to La Paz, the woman said, with or without irony Sevgi could not decide. Then they were in motion again, shuttled smoothly through the sleeping streets to a dedicated suite in the new Hilton Acantilado, with views out across the bowl of the city, and Marstech-level security systems. A beautifully styled Bang & Olufsen data/coms portal sat unobtrusively in the corner of every section but the bathroom, which had its own phone. The beds were vast, begging to be used.
They stood at opposite ends of the floor-to-ceiling window and stared out. It was, once again, obscenely early in the morning—they’d outrun the sun, dumping it scornfully behind them as the suborbital bounced off its trajectory peak and plunged back down to Earth. Now the predawn darkness beyond the windows jarred, and the inverted starscape bowl of city lights below them whispered up a weightless sense of the unreal. It all felt like too much time in virtual. Thin air and hunger just added to the load. Sevgi could feel herself getting vague.
“Want to eat?” she asked.
He shot her a glance she recognized. “Don’t tempt me.”
“Food,” she said primly. “All I’ve eaten in the past day is that simit.”
“Price of progress. On a flatline flight, they would have fed us twice at least. The untold downside of the suborb-traveler lifestyle.”