Ричард Морган - The SF Collection

‘Ortiz,’ Norton said harshly, moving a step ahead.

Ortiz prodded at the chair’s arm controls, and it coasted silently around on the spot to face them. He smiled, a little forcedly.

‘Tom Norton,’ he said, as if it were a philosophical question that had been troubling him. ‘I’m so very sorry to hear about your brother, Tom. I’ve been meaning to call you. And Carl Marsalis, of course. I still haven’t had the chance to thank you for saving my life.’

‘Don’t thank me yet.’

‘Ah.’ Something happened to the planes of the ravaged face. ‘Well, I didn’t imagine that this was a social call.’

‘Jeff talked.’ Norton was trembling with the force of what he’d carried inside him across the continent. ‘Scorpion Response. Wyoming. The whole thing. So don’t you tell me you’re sorry, you piece of shit. You did this, all of it. You’re the reason Jeff is dead.’

‘Am I?’ Ortiz didn’t seem to be disputing it. He placed his hands palm to palm in his lap, pressed them together, maybe to hold down his fear. ‘And so you’ve brought your avenging angel with you. Well, that is fitting I suppose, but I should warn you this chair has—’

‘We know,’ Carl said bleakly. ‘And I’m not here for Norton’s benefit. I came for Sevgi Ertekin.’

‘Ertekin?’ A frown crossed Ortiz’s face, then cleared. ‘Oh yes, the officer you stayed with in Harlem when we had you released. Yes, she died too, didn’t she? A few days ago. I’m afraid I’ve not been keeping up very closely with—’

‘She didn’t die.’ Carl held down the fury with distant, trained reflex. His voice was quiet and cold, like the faint bite of winter in the New York air outside. ‘Sevgi Ertekin was killed. By your avenging angel, Ortiz. By Onbekend. Merrin. Whatever you call him. She died saving my life.’

‘I am… very sorry about that as well.’

‘That’s not good enough.’

‘For you? No, I don’t imagine it would be. I assume there was some…’ Ortiz frowned. ‘Some connection between you and this Ertekin.

Carl said nothing. The words would take him nowhere.

‘Yes, there must have been. You people care about so little in the end, need so little, of the material world and of other people. But when you do choose to own something or someone, when you consider that something or someone to be yours…’

‘Yes, then,’ said Carl, ‘nothing else matters.’

He met the COLIN director’s eyes, saw the way they flinched away.

‘I’m afraid,’ said Ortiz shakily, ‘that matters have run rather out of control in my… my absence from the bridge, as it were. Your involvement, Onbekend, other changing factors. Had I not been removed so unexpectedly from managing the operation, perhaps things would not have become so tangled. I truly regret that, you must believe me.’

‘You still would have murdered over twenty men and women,’ said Norton violently. ‘Just to save your political fucking neck.’

Ortiz shook his head. ‘No, Tom, that isn’t—’

‘Don’t fucking use my name like we’re friends, you piece of shit!’

Carl put a hand on Norton’s arm. ‘Keep it down, Tom. We don’t want your security breaking the door down on us.’

The COLIN exec jerked away from him, looked at him as if he were contagious. In front of them, Ortiz was talking again.

‘—was not for me, personally. You must understand that. I’m a wealthy man, and I have access to even greater wealth through other channels if I need it. I could have afforded to pay off your brother and his accomplices—’

Norton stared. ‘You knew? You knew he was part of it?’

‘I suspected.’ Ortiz coughed a little, hunched over in the chair. He cleared his throat. ‘His story seemed feeble, I thought it was likely he was involved, but… we were once close associates, Tom. Friends, even. You must know I promoted you on his request, just the way I promoted him to Scorpion Response twenty years ago.’

Norton’s voice came through his teeth. ‘Am I supposed to be fucking grateful to you now?’

‘No, of course not. That’s not what I’m saying. Listen to me, please. I suspected Jeff, I didn’t know for sure. But I did know that if I unleashed Onbekend on the others, whoever they were, Jeff would fold. If he had been involved, I knew he’d give me no more trouble. Even in the old days, even with Scorpion Response, he was a logistical manager, a facilitator. Not an operative, not a killer. Jeff never had the stomach for those things.’

Norton grinned savagely down at him. ‘That’s all you know. My brother sent those skaters to kill you. My brother got me to hire Marsalis out of South Florida State to crank up the pressure on you and Onbekend. He was playing you just like you played him.’

‘Is that so?’ An attempted smile wavered on the COLIN director’s face for a moment. ‘Ironic, then, that he provided both the agents of my death and the means to foil them. Ironic too thatyou, Mr Marsalis, should both save my life and then bring everything tumbling down around me. But then, that has always been the double-edged blade that your kind offered us, from the very beginning. Variant thirteen, the avatars of purified violence, our saviours and our nemesis.’

Carl listened to the lilt of imagery in Ortiz’s voice, and thought abruptly of Manco Bambaren’s mannered speeches on pistacos and human history. He wondered idly what genes the two men might share.

‘Where is Onbekend?’ he asked bluntly.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’ Maybe Carl twitched forward, because Ortiz’s voice tightened a little with anxiety. ‘Really, I don’t. Believe me, if I knew—’

‘Jeff Norton said he’d gone back to the altiplano . Back to Bambaren. That’s where you would have contacted him in the beginning to set this up, right?’

‘Yes, but through Bambaren’s organisation. In the end, I could only leave messages. It was he who came to me, here in New York one night, like a ghost through the security around my home.’ Ortiz stared away through the window and shivered a little. ‘Like something I had summoned up. I should have known then, all those lessons our myths and legends scream at us, time and again. Never summon up what you cannot control.’

‘You must have had direct contact with him after that,’ Carl said pragmatically. ‘You set him on me in San Francisco, after the Bulgakov’s Cat arrests.’

Ortiz tried another smile. It guttered and died. ‘Believe me, Mr Marsalis, I tried harder than you’ll ever know to prevent that. I am not an ungrateful man, and you had saved my life. But once decided, Allen Onbekend is a force of nature. You had already threatened the object of his affections in Arequipa, he would not take less than your death. I tried to move you out of range, I had UNGLA attempt to recall you, but it seems you are in your way no less stubborn than any other of your kind. You would not shift. And Onbekend was closing on you too fast for me to do anything else.’

The shock sparked in him. ‘ You had di Palma call me?’

‘Yes, Mr Marsalis.’ Ortiz sighed. ‘And not only then. From the very beginning, Gianfranco di Palma had instructions to remove you from the proceedings as rapidly as possible. We had simply not expected you to be so tenacious in a fight that was not your own.’

Carl remembered the UNGLA clinic in Istanbul. Mehemet Tuzcu and his diplomatic attempts at extraction. His own refusal to shift, the weak fistful of reasons he threw out, like sand in his own eyes. But it had always been Sevgi Ertekin, he knew, even then.

‘Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?’ he asked distractedly

‘So it would appear. A curious match, is it not? But then they do at least have in common that they are both objects for the hormonal hatred the rest of humanity seems constantly to need a target for.’