“I am nothing like you, unluck,” she said coldly.
“—we all know how the familias feel about twists. I don’t imagine Manco’s any different from the other taytas. Must be tough for you.”
Greta said nothing.
“Well?”
“I didn’t hear you ask me a question.”
“Didn’t you?” He grinned mirthlessly. “My question, Greta, was how does a gringa hib twist like yourself end up working front office for the familias?”
“I don’t know, Marsalis. Maybe it’s because some of us twists can transcend what it says in our genes and just get on and do the work. Ever think of that?”
“Greta, you’re asleep four months out of every twelve. That’s going to put a serious dent in anyone’s productivity. Add to that you’re white, you’re a woman, and you’re not from here. The familias aren’t known for their progressive attitudes. So I don’t see any way this works, unless my sources are right and you’re fucking the boss.”
Across the room, Isaac’s eyes widened with disbelieving fury. She caught his gaze and shook her head, then fixed Marsalis with a stare.
“Is that what you’d like to believe?”
“No, it’s what Stefan Nevant tells me.”
“Nevant?” Greta sneered. “That shithead? Fucking wannabe pistaco, too stupid to realize—”
She stopped, sat silent.
Fucking end-of-cycle slippage, she knew dismally. Fucking traitorous genetic bullshit modifi—
Marsalis nodded. “Too stupid to realize what?”
“To realize. That he needed us, and we didn’t need him at all.”
“That’s not what you were going to say.”
“Oh, so now you’re a fucking telepath?”
He got off the edge of the desk. “Let’s not make this more unpleasant than it’s got to be, Greta.”
“I agree. In fact, let’s stop this shit right now.”
The new voice held them both frozen for a pair of seconds. Greta locked onto the figure in the doorway, then looked back just in time to see Marsalis’s face slacken into resignation. His lips formed a word, a name, she realized, and realized at the same moment, confusedly but surely, that it was all over.
Sevgi Ertekin stepped into the room, Marstech Beretta in hand.
In the taxi, they sat with a frigid thirty centimeters of plastic seat between them and stared from opposite side windows at the passing frontages. Outside, the sun was on its way up into a sky of flawless blue, striking the early-morning chill out of the air and lighting the white volcanic stonework of the old town almost incandescent. Traffic already clogged the main streets, slowed passage to a jerky crawl.
“We’re going to miss our fucking flight,” she said grimly.
“Ertekin, this place has a dozen flights a day to Lima. We’ve got no problem getting out of here.”
“No, but we’ve got a big fucking problem making the Oakland suborbital out of Lima if we miss this flight.”
He shrugged. “So we wait in Lima, catch a later bounce to Oakland. This guy they’ve found is dead, right? He’s not in a hurry.”
She swung on him. “What the fuck were you doing back there?”
“Working a source, what did it look like?”
“To me? Looked like you were winding up to beat a confession out of her.”
“I wasn’t looking for a confession. I don’t think she knows about our little reception committee last night.”
“Shame you didn’t think to find that out before you cut loose on the hired help.”
Carl shrugged. “They’ll live.”
“The one out in the courtyard may not. I checked him on my way in. At a guess I’d say you fractured his skull.”
“That’s hardly the point.”
“No, the point is that I told you we were done here. I told you we were going to stay put in the hotel until we were ready to fly out. The point is that you told me you would.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
She said something in Turkish under her breath. He wondered whether to tell her the truth: that he had slept, but not for very long. Had stung himself awake with dreams of Elena Aguirre muttering behind him in the gloom of Felipe Souza’s cargo section, had thought for one icy moment that she stood there beside the bed in the darkened hotel suite, staring down at him glitter-eyed. He’d dressed and gone out, itching to do violence, to do anything that would chase out the remembered powerlessness.
Instead, he told her: “She knows Merrin.”
Momentary stillness, a barely perceptible stiffening, then the scant shift of her profile from the window, a single, sidelong glance.
“Yeah, right.”
“I ran a long list of names on her, mostly victims from your list. Merrin’s was the only one that got a reaction. And when I moved on to the next name, she relaxed right back down again. Either she knew him before he went to Mars, or she knows him now.”
“Or she knows someone else with that name, or did once.” She’d gone back to looking out of the window. “Or it sounded like something or someone she knew, or you’re mistaken about the way she reacted. You’re chasing shadows and you know it.”
“Someone tried to kill us last night.”
“Yeah, and on your own admission Jurgens knows nothing about it.”
“I said she didn’t seem to.”
“Like she seemed to know Merrin, you mean?” She looked at him again, but this time there was no hostility. She just looked tired. “Look, Marsalis, you can’t have it both ways. Either we trust your instincts or we don’t.”
“And you don’t?”
She sighed. “I don’t trust this.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, this?”
“It means this fucking dive back to the visceral level all the time. This throwing your weight around and pissing people off and pushing until something breaks loose and gives us someone new to fight. Confrontation, escalation, fucking death or glory.” She gestured helplessly. “I mean, maybe that worked for Project Lawman back in the day, but it isn’t going to cut it here. This is an investigation, not a brawl.”
“Osprey.”
“What?”
“Osprey. I’m not American, I was never part of Project Lawman.” He frowned, flicker of something recalled, too faint now to get back. “And another thing I’m not, Ertekin, just so you keep it in mind. I’m not Ethan.”
For a moment, he thought she’d explode on him, the way she had the night before on the highway, with the corpses draped across the stalled and blinded jeep. But she only hooded her gaze and turned away.
“I know who you are,” she said quietly.
They didn’t speak again until they reached the airport.
They made the Lima flight with a couple of minutes to spare, got into the capital on time, and confirmed their places on the Oakland suborb an hour before it lifted.
Time to kill.
Quiet amid the bustle and vaulted space of the Lima terminal, Sevgi faced herself in a washroom mirror. She stared for what seemed like a long time, then shrugged and fed herself the syn capsules one at a time.
Dry-swallowed and grimaced as they went down.
CHAPTER 33
Alcatraz station. Special Cases Division.
By the time she got there, the superfunction capsules had kicked in with a vengeance. Her feelings were her own again, vacuum-packed back into the steel canister she’d made for them. An icy detachment propped up focus and attention to the detail beyond the mirror.
Another fucking mirror, she noted.
But this time she sat behind the glass and watched the scene in the interview room on the other side. Coyle and Rovayo and a woman who sprawled leggily in the chair provided, wore formfitting black under a heavy leather jacket she hadn’t bothered to take off, and watched her interrogators with energetic, gum-chewing dislike. She was young, not far into her twenties, and her harsh-boned, Slavic face carried the sneer well. The rest was pure Rim mix—short blond hair hacked about in a classic Jakarta shreddie cut that didn’t really suit her, crimson Chinese characters embroidered down the leg of her one-piece from hip to ankle, the baroque blue ink of a Maori-look skin-sting curled across her left temple. Her voice, as it strained through the speaker to the observers’ gallery, was heavily accented.