Ричард Морган - The SF Collection

Jeff took the tissue, then a couple more from the box. While he staunched the blood flow from his nose, Norton poured into the single glass. He pushed the cognac across the table top.

‘There’s your drink,’ he told his brother. ‘Now make it good.’

‘Scorpion Response,’ he told them.

Carl nodded. ‘Claw Control. Right. You’re still using the call signs, you sad fuck. What were you, Jeff, back-room support? You sure as fuck weren’t the front end of anything as nasty as Scorpion.’

‘You’ve heard of these guys?’ Norton asked him.

‘On the grapevine, yeah. Ghost squad in the Pacific Rim theatres, supposed to be one of the last covert initiatives before the secession.’ Carl looked speculatively down at Jeff Norton. ‘So let’s hear it, Jeff. What was your end?’

‘Logistics,’ the Human Cost director said sulkily. ‘I was the operations co-ordinator.’

‘Right.’

‘When the fuck was this?’ Norton stared at his brother. ‘You didn’t even move out here until ’94. You were in New York.’

Jeff Norton shook his head wearily. ‘I was out here all the time, Tom. Back and forth, Union to the Rim, Rim to South East Asia. We had offices all over. Half the time, I wasn’t home more than one weekend in five.’ He took the blood-clotted tissues away from his nose, dumped them on the coffee table and grimaced. ‘Anyway, how would you have known? We saw you what, once a month, if that?’

‘I was busy,’ said Norton numbly.

‘The way I heard it,’ Carl said. ‘Secession should have been the end of Scorpion Response. Supposed to have been wound up like all the other dirty little bags of deniability the American public didn’t need to be told about. That’s the official version, anyway. But this is the seventies, a good few years before they would have been employing you, Jeff. So what happened? They go private?’

Jeff shot him a startled look. ‘You heard that?’

‘No. But it wouldn’t be the first time a bunch of sneak-op thugs couldn’t face early retirement, and went to the market instead. That what happened?’

‘Scorpion Response were retained.’ Jeff was still sulking. More tissues, tugged up from the box on the table. Carl watched him impassively.

‘Retained by who?’

Norton had the answer for that already. ‘The Rim States. Got to be. They’ve just cut loose, the Pacific arena’s their future. Anything that gave them an edge had to be worth hanging onto, right.’

‘That’s right, little brother.’ Jeff moved the tissues from his nose long enough to knock back a chunk of the cognac. ‘Starting to see the big picture now?’

‘Lola Montes,’ Carl said. ‘Jasper Whitlock, Ulysses Ward, Eddie Tanaka. The rest of them. All Scorpion personnel?’

‘Yeah. Not those names, but yeah.’

‘And Onbekend.’

‘Yeah.’ Jeff Norton’s voice shaded with something. Carl thought it might be fear. ‘Him too. Some of the time. He came and went, you know. On secondment.’

‘But not Merrin?’

The Human Cost director sneered. ‘Onbekend was Merrin to us. We didn’t know about the other one, no one knew there were two.’ He looked down into his glass. ‘Not until now.’

Carl paced across the office to the drinks cabinet. He stared down at the assembly of bottles and glasses. The Bayview Tavern mapped itself onto his vision, drinking with Sevgi Ertekin, stolen whisky from behind the bar and the stink of gunfire still hanging in the air. He felt the swift skid of anger in his guts, wanted to smash everything in the cabinet, take one shattered bottle by the neck, go back to Jeff Norton with it and–

‘N-djinn search on the victims turned up no connections between them,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Which means you must have used some very high-powered Rim n-djinn capacity of your own to bury these people in their new lives. Now I can only see one reason why anybody would bother to do that.’

‘You were winding up.’ Realisation etching wonder into Tom Norton’s tone. ‘Shutting the whole operation down and scattering.’

Carl turned back to face the sofa, empty handed.

‘When, Jeff? When, and why?’

Jeff Norton glanced across at his brother. ‘I’d have thought you’d be able to work that one out for yourself, Tom.’

The COLIN exec nodded. ‘You came out here, took up the Human Cost job in ’94. They were burying you too. Had to be some time around then.’

Jeff put down his latest clump of bloodied tissue, reached for more. There was a thin smile playing about his lips. A little more blood trickled down into the grin before he could soak it up.

‘Little earlier in fact,’ he said. ‘Thing like that has quite a momentum once it’s rolling, it takes a while to brake. Say ’92 for the decision, early ’93 to cease operations. And we were all gone by the following year.’

Carl stepped closer. ‘I asked you why.’

The Human Cost director stared back up at him, dabbing at his nose. He seemed still to be smiling.

‘Can’t you guess?’

‘Jacobsen.’

The name fell off his lips, dropped into the room like an invocation. The era, ’91 to ’94, blazed across his memory in feed footage flicker. Riots, the surging crowds and lines of armoured police, the vehicles in flames. Pontificating holy men and ranting political pundits, UNGLA communiqués and speeches, and behind it all the quiet, balding figure of the Swedish commissioner, reading from his report in the measured tones of the career diplomat, like a man trying to deploy an umbrella in a hurricane. Words swept away, badly summarised, quoted, misquoted, taken out of context, used and abused for political capital. The awful, creeping sense that it did, after all, have something to do with him, Carl Marsalis, Osprey’s finest; that, impossible though it had once seemed, some idiot wave of opinion among the grazing cudlips really did matter now, and his life would be affected after all.

Jacobsen.

Oh, yes, affected after all.

Covert heroes to paraded monsters in less than three years. The bleak pronouncements, the bleaker choices; the tracts, or the long sleep and exile to the endless tract of Mars, jostled towards one or the other by the idiot mob, like a condemned man swept forward towards a choice of gallows.

And the cryocap, chilly and constraining, filling slowly with gel as the sedatives took his impulse to panic away from him, the same way they’d taken his discarded combat gear at demob. The long sleep, falling over him like the shadow of a building a thousand storeys tall, blotting out the sun.

Jacobsen.

Jeff Norton leaned forward for his glass again. ‘That’s right, Jacobsen. We didn’t know what the accords would actually look like in ’92, it was all still at a draft stage. But the writing was pretty fucking clearly on the wall. Didn’t take a genius to see the way things were going to fall.’

‘But.’ Tom Norton, shaking his head. ‘What’s that got to do with anything? Okay, you had Onbekend. But all these other people – Montes, Tanaka and the rest. They weren’t variants, they were ordinary humans. You were an ordinary human. Why should Jacobsen have mattered?’

Carl stood over the Human Cost director, and saw, vaguely, the shape of what was coming.

‘It mattered,’ he said evenly, ‘because of what they were doing. Right, Jeff? It wasn’t the personnel, was it? It was what Scorpion Response did. What was your brief, Jeff? And don’t ask me to guess again, because I will hurt you if you do.’

Jeff Norton shrugged and drained his cognac.

‘Breeding,’ he said.

His brother blinked. ‘Breeding what?’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake , Tom, what do you think?’ Jeff gestured violently, nearly knocked over the bottle. The cognac seemed to have gone to his head. ‘Breeding fucking variants . Like your friend here, like Nuying. Like everything we could lay our hands on over there.’