Richard Morgan - Black Man / Thirteen

It was the same feeling, the way he’d felt her as he watched the light die away over the hills of Marin County, and again as he left the canyons of Manhattan by way of the Queensboro Bridge. He sat and let the sensation rinse through him, and with it he felt a creeping sense of comprehension, conscious thought catching up with the undefined the way he’d caught up with Gray. Maybe it was the codeine, tripping a synaptic switch somewhere, letting the understanding through. Sevgi was gone , his brain was wired to process that much successfully. But not that she was dead . For the ancient Central African ancestor genes, that one just wouldn’t compute. People don’t just cease to exist, they don’t just vanish into thin fucking air. When people are gone , some deeply programmed part of his consciousness was insisting, it’s because they’re somewhere else, right? So Sevgi’s gone. Fine. So where’s she gone, let’s find that out, because then we can fucking go there and find her, be with her, and finally get rid of this fucking ache.

So.

Those hills dying into darkness on the other side of the bay—think she might be over there? Or in among all that glass and steel over there on the other side of the bridge, maybe? Or, okay, up this fucking canyon maybe, and over the other side of those mountains there. Maybe she’s there. Up past the luminous unreal light, up in the thin air, waiting there for you.

For the first time in his life, he saw why the cudlips might find it hard not to believe in an afterlife, in some other place you go when you’re gone from here.

And then, as he beat his own wiring, as the comprehension settled in, the feeling it had come to explain melted away, and left him nothing in its place but the raw pain in his chest and the stinging salve of the hate.

And out of thin air, as if in answer, the helicopters came.

There were two of them, nondescript commercial machines, bumping down through the brilliant canyon air with the ungainly caution of crane flies. They quartered noisily back and forth, dipped about for a while, angled rotor blur shimmering in the sun, and then they held position over the river opposite the lodge. Carl watched bleakly from the shattered picture window. Enough carrying capacity in the two aircraft for a dozen men at least. He stayed back out of view, let the scattered corpses on the ground around the lodge door paint the picture he wanted. The helicopters dithered and dipped. Finally, he picked up one of the Steyr assault rifles and loosed a quick burst out the window in their general direction. The response was immediate—both machines reared up and fled downriver, presumably in search of a safe place to land.

The path ran on that way, he knew, grooving back down toward the water, building another rock wall on its landward side. They’d be able to come back that way, upriver, and stay hidden right to the edge of the cleared ground outside the lodge, mirror-imaging the approach he’d made a couple of hours ago from the other side. He frowned a little, cuddled the folding frame stock of the Steyr into his shoulder, squinted along the sight, and panned experimentally across the cleared ground. He was pretty sure he could knock down anyone coming for the house before they’d made a couple of meters in the open. They might try a rush assault but it wasn’t likely—they didn’t know how many were in the house, or what they might have done with Greta Jurgens, whether she was alive or dead, safe in her womb or dragged downstairs ready to be held up ragdoll-limp as a shield.

And the lodge was a tough nut to crack. Ferrer had been clear about that much. Bitch got a fucking fortress there, man. Right into the fucking rock, no way you can come down from above, smooth sides so you can’t sneak up. I mean. He sat back, hands in the pockets of his clean new chinos, smirking and confident now he’d done his deal. Who the fuck she expecting, man, the fucking army? And all so she can fucking sleep ? Man, I don’t know what hold that bitch got on Manco’s balls, but it’s gotta be something pretty fucking major, get him doing all this. Gotta give the mother of all blow jobs or something.

Like Stefan Nevant before him, Suerte saw the results and jumped to the obvious wrong conclusion. Onbekend stayed in the shadows. If you didn’t know he was there already, you looked for other, more visible explanations.

Like unhuman monsters, home from Mars.

It was the dynamic Ortiz had built his whole cover-up effort around. A monster stalks us! All hands to the palisades and the torches! Don’t ask, don’t ever ask who’s really making all this happen.

A head poked up from down near the river. Carl let him have a good look around, then fired off another burst. Stone chips and dust leapt in the air; the head jerked back down.

Just so they’re clear on the situation.

“Marsalis?”

Manco Bambarén’s voice. Carl got his back to the side of the window space, stayed in the shadows, and edged an eye around. Steep early-afternoon sunlight flooded down into the canyon. If you crouched and peered upward, you could just see the rich angled fall of it past the rim, and a restful blue gloom beneath where the higher parts of the valley wall were cast in shadow. It was very quiet now that the helicopters were gone—the whirring scrape of crickets, and the buzzing of flies on the bodies outside.

“Black man, is that you?”

“Good guess,” he shouted back, dumping Bambarén’s Spanish for Quechua. “What do you want?”

Brief hesitation. Carl wondered if Onbekend maybe couldn’t follow a conversation in Quechua—there was no guarantee he’d have learned it in his time living hidden up on the altiplano. He’d get by easily enough with Spanish and English. And as Bambarén’s pet pistaco , he’d have no need to integrate with the locals. Standard thirteen isolation would work like a dream.

Sure enough, Bambarén stayed in Spanish. “It’s really about what you want, Marsalis. Can we talk?”

“Sure. Come on in.”

“You guarantee not to shoot me before you’ve heard what I have to say?”

Carl grinned. “I don’t know, you going to take the word of a twist on that?”

“Yes. I will.”

“Then come on across. No weapons, no body armor, hands where I can see them.” Carl paused. “Oh yeah, and bring your brother with you.”

Long, long silence. The crickets scraped in the heated air outside.

“What’s the matter, Manco? You not been watching the feeds? It’s all burned down now, didn’t you know? Ortiz is gone, COLIN are cleaning house. We know all about Onbekend. So let’s see both of you.”

It took a couple of minutes, but then the two figures emerged from the cover down by the path and walked steadily up toward the lodge, hands clasped over their heads. Carl watched them over the Steyr’s sight. Onbekend was holding one arm lopsided, as if it hurt to lift. Carl remembered Sevgi in the Bayview bar— Hit him a couple of times, but not enough to put him down. Thirteens, huh.

Yeah, we’re tough motherfuckers.

He lined up on Onbekend’s face, flexed his trigger finger a couple of times, took up the tension. Then let it go, put the gun aside impatiently. He picked up a handgun, another Glock, from the pile on the floor, checked the load, and snapped the slide. As Bambarén and Onbekend reached the doorway, he stepped back, mindful of sniping angles through the picture window, and wagged the pistol at them.

“Come on in.”

Onbekend stared at him, spat out English. “Where is she, Marsalis?”

“Not so hasty. Back there to the table in the alcove, both of you. Hands on your head at all times. I’m not going to mess about patting you down, so if either of you do move a hand anywhere near your body without my permission, I’ll just make the assumption and kill you. Got that?”