Richard Morgan - Black Man / Thirteen

Bambarén pivoted back and forth slightly, eyes sweeping the open-plan space inside the lodge. Understanding widened his eyes.

“You came here alone?”

“Go to the table. Sit down in the two chairs I’ve pulled out. Keep your hands on your heads until you’re seated, and then put them on the table in front of you. No sudden moves. Sudden movement will get you dead.”

He tugged the door closed, pulled it until the latch whined over into lock.

“Marsalis, I have fifteen men out there.” Bambarén’s voice was low and conversational as he walked to the table. He’d shifted into English as well. “You’re sealed in. Let’s talk about this.”

“We’re going to talk about it. But you’re going to be sitting down when we do. Hands where I can see them, and then flat on the table in front of you.”

They seated themselves, awkward with the need to keep their hands lifted. Bambarén took the head of the table, Onbekend the seat adjacent. This far back in the open-plan space, the lodge made inroads into the cliff face and it was cool and dim, so the two men looked like part of some arcane spiritualist gathering, stiff-backed in the chairs, palms down on the wood, expressions taut. Carl pulled out a chair opposite Onbekend and sat in it, well back from the edge of the table. He floated the Glock on his knee.

“And now what?” the other thirteen asked evenly.

“Now we talk about why I shouldn’t kill you both. Any ideas?”

“Are you so anxious to die, black man?” Bambarén asked.

Carl gave him a faint smile. “Well, fifteen-to-one is long odds, it’s true. But then again, eight-to-one didn’t look good, either, and there they all are, out there for the flies.”

“Have you learned nothing?” Onbekend was looking at him with the same contempt he’d given off in the Bayview bar. “Are you still nothing better than a soldier for the cudlips?”

Bambarén stiffened. Carl put a small smile together.

“Want to be careful who you use that word around, brother. It’s not Manco here’s fault he didn’t get an upgraded limbic system and a beefed-up area thirteen out of Isabela’s raw materials.”

Onbekend barely flickered a glance at Bambarén. “I’m not talking about Manco, and he knows it. I’m talking about the men at the UN you sold your soul to.”

“I’m not here for them.”

Onbekend’s eyes narrowed. “Then why did you come?”

“Because you killed a friend of mine.”

“If you have friends, hired man, then I don’t know them. Who have I killed?”

“You shot a woman called Sevgi Ertekin, a police officer, when she chased you out into the street in Bayview. You shot her with a Haag pistol, and she died.”

“Were you fucking her?”

“Yeah, we were fucking each other. Rather like you and Jurgens.”

Onbekend’s face whitened as he saw the corollary. He cleared his throat.

“It was a firefight,” he said quietly. “Not personal. You would have done the same in my place.”

Carl thought of Garrod Horkan camp and Gaby. The Haag shells knocking her down.

“That’s not the issue.”

“Then what is?”

Carl stared at the other thirteen. “Payment.”

“Listen to me, Marsalis.” Manco Bambarén, misunderstanding what he’d heard. “Whatever you think you’re owed, we can come to an agreement.”

“Manco, shut up.” The tayta looked at Onbekend as if the thirteen had slapped him. Onbekend ignored him, maybe didn’t even notice. His eyes had never left Carl’s face. “You want me to buy Greta’s life with my own?”

“Why not? It’s the same deal you offered Toni Montes in the Freeport, isn’t it? Her life for her children.”

Onbekend looked down at his hands. “If you knew what Toni Montes had done with her life before she acquired that name, had done with other children before she acquired her own, you would perhaps not judge me so harshly.”

“I don’t judge you at all. I just want you dead.”

“If you kill him, black man, you’ll have to kill me as well.” There was a quiet determination in Bambarén’s voice. “And then my men will cut you down like a rabid dog.”

Carl threw him a glance. He smiled, shook his head a little.

“You’re really enjoying having a younger brother all over again, aren’t you, Manco. Well, I don’t suppose I can blame you. But do you want to know something about this brother of yours?” He nodded at Onbekend. “This brother of yours is a twin. You’ve actually got two younger brothers by way of your mother’s rather desperate attempts to stay afloat in Peru’s new corporate dream. The other one’s called Allen Merrin. Unfortunately, he’s dead. Do you want to know why?”

Bambarén looked back and forth between the two thirteens.

“He’s dead because you killed him, Marsalis,” Onbekend said casually. “That’s what I heard.”

“He’s dead because his twin brother, Onbekend here, had him brought back from Mars as a sacrificial gene set. Sold him to the people he’s been working for. Would have used him to explain away—”

“But you did kill him, didn’t you?”

The tayta stared at Onbekend. “What is this? What’s he talking about?”

“It’s nothing.”

“ Don’t tell me it’s nothing, Onbee.” There was a gathering tightness in Bambarén’s voice now. The same thing Carl had seen on his face when Onbekend used the word cudlip . “What is he talking about?”

“I’m talking about Isabela’s other modified son.” Carl kept the pistol raised in Onbekend’s direction. “The egg your mother sold to the gringos sub-divided a few days in, Manco, and Project Lawman ended up with two identical thirteens for the price of one. That’s very handy when it comes to crime scene genetic trace. While your brother here went about slaughtering inconvenient colleagues from his past, he also arranged for his twin to take the fall for it.”

“Don’t listen to him, Manco. This is—”

“Is he lying?” The look on the tayta ’s face marked it as rhetorical. His voice sank almost to a whisper. “You did this? You used your own blood to cover yourself?”

“Manco, there really wasn’t much option. I told you the situation Ortiz put me in, I told you the danger it—”

“You did not tell me this!”

And now Bambarén was trembling, still staring at the thirteen whose genes he shared. His face twitched with suppressed rage.

“A brother?” he asked hoarsely. “A twin? You sold your twin brother? After you came to me and I gave you—”

“It’s not important , Manco. I never knew him, we never even met —”

“He was your blood!” Bambarén started to get up. Carl wagged the Glock at him and he sank back, sat like something coiled. “He was your mother’s blood! I told you when you came to me, blood is everything . The corporations have stolen our souls, they shatter the bonds that make us strong, turn us into uniform strangers living out our lives alone in polymered boxes. Family is all we have. ”

“Not if you’re a thirteen,” Carl told him somberly.

There was a long pause.

“Manco, listen to me,” Onbekend said. “I did this to protect—”

“Did you ever even tell our mother?” Bambarén’s face had gone cold and hard as the stones out at Sacsayhuamán, and his voice had grown quiet as the wind. “Did you ever tell Isabela that she had another son somewhere?”

Onbekend’s temper snapped across. “For fuck’s sake, Manco, there would have been no point! ”

“No?”

“No. He was on Mars! ”

The quiet swept in after the words like a tide, like a breath snuffing candle flames out. They sat in silence in the dim light.