Richard Morgan - Black Man / Thirteen

“Amy Westhoff?”

He raised himself out of his seat as she reached his booth, offered her his hand. She took it, gave him a searching look.

“Yeah. Agent…di Palma, is it?”

“That’s right.” He flashed his UNGLA ID, carefully held so she’d see the photo but not the name. Feigned a querying frown to distract her as he put the badge away again. “But I see you’ve come on your own?”

She made a dismissive gesture as she seated herself on the other side of the table. The lie hurried out. “Yeah, well, my partner’s wrapped up with, uh, some other stuff right now. He couldn’t make it. Now, you said this is about the bust on Ethan Conrad four years back. I don’t really see how that can have anything to do with me, or with Datacrime.”

“Well, it is only a stray lead. But then…can I get you a drink, maybe?”

“No, thank you. I’ve got to go back on duty. Can we make this quick?”

“Certainly.” Carl sipped at the Red Stripe in front of him. “In fact, my own jurisdiction in this matter is, should I say, rather loose. Obviously we’re not on UN territory here.”

“Not far from it, though.”

“No, true enough.” Carl put his drink down, let his hands drop into his lap. “Well then, I guess you’re familiar with the case. I understand you had some kind of relationship with Ethan Conrad, back before it was known what he was.”

Tautly. “That’s right, I did. Well before anybody knew what he was.”

“Ah, yes, quite. Well, it’s just that I’ve received information from an NYPD officer, an ex-officer in fact, Sevgi Ertekin. Would you have heard of her?”

The waitress sauntered over, eyebrows raised, notepad not yet out of her apron pocket. It was early yet. Aside from the lonely broker, they had the place to themselves.

“Get you guys any—”

“We’re fine,” said Amy Westhoff curtly.

The waitress shrugged and backed off. Carl gave an apologetic look. Westhoff waited until she’d gone back to the bar before she spoke again.

“I knew Ertekin, vaguely, yeah. So what’s she been saying?”

“Well, she said that you tipped off UNGLA about Conrad’s thirteen status because you were jealous that he’d left you, and that you then tried to call and warn him at the last minute. But were too late, obviously. Now—”

“That fucking bitch!” But even in the low light, he could see that Amy Westhoff’s face had gone ashen.

“You’d deny that then, I assume.”

Westhoff lifted a trembling finger. “You go back to that raghead bitch, and you tell her from me—”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Sevgi Ertekin is dead. But she did give me a message for you, something she meant to do but couldn’t manage.”

The blond woman’s eyes narrowed. “What message?”

Then she flinched, yelped, reared back in the booth, and looked down at her trouser leg. She pressed on her thigh with both hands.

“What the fuck was that?”

“That was a genetically modified curare flechette,” Carl said coldly. “It’s going to paralyze your skeletal muscle system so you can’t breathe or call for help.”

Westhoff stared at him. Tried to get up from the table, made a muffled grunting sound instead and dropped back into her seat, still staring.

“It’s a vastly improved variant on natural curare,” he went on. “You might call it the thirteen of poisons. I think you’ll last about seven or eight minutes. Enjoy.”

He slid the Red Stripe over so it stood in front of her. Westhoff’s mouth twitched, and she slumped against the wall. Carl got up to go. He leaned in close.

“Sevgi Ertekin wanted you dead,” he told her softly. “And now you are.”

Then he eased out of the booth and headed for the door. On the way out, he looked across at the bar, where the waitress sat on a stool, fiddling with some aspect of her phone. As she glanced up at him, Carl fielded her gaze, rolled his eyes expressively, put on jilted, hurt, and weary . The girl pulled a sympathetic face, smiled at him, and went back to her phone. He reached the door, pushed it open, and let himself back out into the late-afternoon chill.

He dropped the flechette gun down a grate on Wall Street, a little sad to see it go after the trouble Matthew had gone to in tracking down a suitably disreputable dealer for him, and the price the suitably disreputable dealer had screwed out of him when it became clear that Carl was in a hurry.

Then again, it had served its purpose.

Hope that was what you wanted, Sevgi.

He called Norton from a cab on the way to JFK.

“Can you talk?”

“Yeah, I’m back at Jefferson Park. Where are you?”

“Queensboro Bridge. On my way to the airport.”

“You’re still here , in town ?” Norton’s voice punched out of the phone. “What the fuck are you playing at, Marsalis?”

“I had a couple of things to do. Am I still safe to fly?”

Norton blew out a long breath. “Yeah, should be. I’ve got the NYPD hammering on my door and Weill Cornell screaming about lawsuits, but so far the COLIN mandate is holding. Always knew there was some reason I took this job.”

“That old-time corporate power, huh?” Carl grew serious. “Think they’ll try and nail you, though?”

“Well, for now it’s my train set, so I’m fine. And anyway, I was in the bathroom, remember. No idea what was going on till you called me and there’s Ortiz, dead in his chair.”

“Sounds kind of thin.”

“It is kind of thin. But this is the most powerful nongovernmental body on the planet we’re talking about, and right now they’ve got my back. Quit worrying about me, Marsalis. You want to help, just get your ass out of Union jurisdiction right now.”

“On my way.”

He hung up and looked out the taxi window. Ribbed light blipped through the steel lattices of the bridge structure as they headed out over the span, strobed across his face and turned the air in the cab alternately dusty and dimmed. Back across the East River, Manhattan made its block graph skyline against a cold, perfect blue. The sun glowed and dripped like broken yolk off the top and down the side of one of the new black nanobuild towers. Departure clung to the shrinking scene like mist.

The same obscure desire he’d felt staring at the Marin Headlands two nights ago came and stabbed him in the heart all over again. He could not pin down what it meant, could only give it a name.

Sevgi.

The path down into Colca was a foot-pounded dusty white, in places barely an improvement over the loose scree and scrub it cut through. Initially, it straggled and twisted along the rim of the canyon like a recently unwound length of cable with the worst of the kinks still not out. It headed out of the village in a relatively straight line, followed the line of the canyon more or less, brushed up to the edge here and there, close enough to offer a dizzying view downward, then slid away again as if unnerved by the drop. A couple of kilometers out of town, the path skirted a desolate cleared space with a paint-peeled rusting goal iron at either end. It kinked a couple more times and then found and dropped into a wide basin-shaped bite in the canyon wall, riding the curve around and down like the track of a roulette ball made visible on its fall toward the luck of the numbers. Thereafter, it fell abruptly off the edge of the canyon, spilled down the flank of the valley in a concertina of hairpin turns that made grudging concession to the steep angle of descent, and arrived at last, in dust and sliding pebbles, at an ancient wooden suspension bridge across the pale greenish flow of the river.