Black Man (63 page)

“You need to get a sense of geography about this, Suerte.”

Suerte Ferrer glowered up from the holding cell chair as Carl walked around him. Immigration had cuffed him there. “Don’t need no fucking geography lessons from you, nigger.”

The insult twanged through him, freighted with memories from South Florida State. It was the first time he’d heard it since Dudeck.

Of course, he’d heard the word
twist
a few times in the interim.

“I see you’re acclimatizing to Jesusland culture pretty well.” Carl completed his circuit and leaned on the table at Ferrer’s level. Their captive was still grimy and tired looking from his border transit in a false-bottomed crate purporting to contain experimentally gene-modified rapeseed oil. He flinched back as Carl went face-to-face with him. “You want to go back there, maybe, Suerte? That what you want?”

“Quiros said—”

Carl slammed the table. “I don’t know this Quiros. And I don’t fucking want to know him. You think we pulled your autohauler out of the line for luck? You have been sold, to me, and by someone a lot farther up the food chain than your pal Quiros. So if you think you’re going get some slick down-the-wire Seattle lawyer come pull you out of here, you’re wrong.”

He went around the table and took a seat again, next to Norton, who’d done nothing but sit with his legs thrust out in front of him and stare somberly the whole time. Carl jerked a thumb toward the cell door, which they’d left promisingly ajar when they came in.

“Out there, Suerte, you’ve got a highway that goes in two directions. It goes west to the Freeport, or it goes east back into Jesusland and a bust for illegal crossover. Your choice which direction you get to take.”

“Who the fuck are you people?” Ferrer asked.

Norton exchanged a look with Carl. He leaned forward and cleared his throat. “We’re you’re fairy godmothers, Ferrer. Surprised you didn’t recognize us.”

“Yeah, we’re looking to grant all your wishes.”

“See, this identity is blown.” Norton gestured at the tabletop, where the documents Ferrer had been carrying were spread out. “Carlton García. RimSec have a warrant out on you under that name from San Diego to Vancouver and back. Even if we hadn’t fished you out here, you’d get about three days into the Rim before you tripped something and ended up either busted or yoked to some gang-master who’d put you to work fifteen hours a day in a trench and expect you to suck his dick for the privilege.”

Carl grinned skullishly. “Was that the Rimside dream you had in mind, Suerte?”

“Go west, young man, go west,” Norton said piously. “But go with some cash and a decent fake ID.”

“Both of which we’ll give you,” Carl told him. “Together with a bus ticket right into the Freeport. And all you’ve got to do is answer a couple of questions we have about your cousin Manco Bambarén.”

“Hey!” Suerte Ferrer backed up in the chair. His hands chopped a flat cross out of the air in front of him.

“I don’t know nothing about Manco’s operation, they didn’t tell me shit about any of that. I didn’t live down there more than a couple of years on and off anyway.”

Carl and Norton swapped another look. Carl sighed.

“That’s a shame,” he said.

“Yeah.” Norton started to get up. “We’ll tell the
migra
boys not to rough you up too bad before they dump you back over.”

“Hope you’ve enjoyed your brief stay in the Land of Opportunity.”

“Wait!”

Greta Jurgens’s hibernation retreat was an environment-blended two-story lodge built right into the side of a cliff face set back a couple of dozen meters from the riverbank. Fifteen meters or more of scrubby open ground from where the path from the bridge rose out of the groove it followed along the river, rounded a worn rock bluff, and petered out in the scrub a handful of paces from the front door.

The upper-story windows were blanked with carbon-fiber security shutters, but downstairs there was activity. Motion visible through a wide picture window, and men darting in and out of the open door with weapons in their hands. Carl counted five before he slid back into cover, none of them yet fitted out in the weblar jackets the three down by the river had worn. One of them, older and apparently in charge, was already on the phone for further orders. Carl crouched where the rock wall on the right of the path still rose over a meter high and listened to the reports of his coming.

“…sounds like a whole fucking squad.” Voice panicky and small across the distance and the steady white-noise pour of the river in the background. “I can’t raise Lucho or Miguel down at the bridge.”

There’s a fucking mule here with panniers that look like they fucking blew up or something. I don’t know if—”

Pause.

“All right then, but you’d better make it quick.” A shouted aside. “You fucking idiots get your jackets on.”

Shit.

Well, not like you weren’t expecting this.

He went around the corner of the shallowing rock wall at a taut, bent-kneed run, sharkpunch slung and cling-padded to his thigh once more, Glock held out in both hands at head height before him like some kind of venerated icon.

It took them the first three meters to spot him, another two before they realized he wasn’t one of their own. He held fire until they realized, didn’t want to waste the shots. But as the yells erupted and weapons came up, he squeezed the trigger and the pistol yapped in his hands like a badly behaved little dog. He came on in, same rapid pace, straight line toward them,
Make the shots count
.

The older guy with the phone, jittering in front of his own men’s guns, tugging a pistol loose from somewhere. Carl’s third and fourth shots put him down, staggering back against the wall and doorjamb behind him, clawing for support, sinking fast.
One down
. More yelling, boiling confusion. Someone got off return fire—
At fucking last, Jesus where’d you get these guys, Manco
—but it crackled nowhere near, and the mesh made him ignore it. No time, no time, still firing, the steady, flat smack of the Glock rounds, the picture window starred and cratered, had to be security glass. Another guy with a Steyr, shooting wildly from the hip, correct right with the Glock and knock him off his feet like some tugging trick with a wire.
Two down
. The others were in the game now, cacophony of gunblasts, automatic stutter, and the dull boom of shotguns. Pale dry earth erupted from the ground to his right and in
front, he darted left, lost some focus, thought he tagged a third target as the guy darted back inside the lodge, couldn’t be sure.

The two remaining outside huddled back toward the door as well, weapons held higher; they’d be getting the range. Shotgun blast, he caught the outer edge of the spread, felt a couple of pellets sting through in his legs. He sprinted the rest of the way in, emptying the Glock as he came. A slug finally caught him somewhere low in the ribs, hammer-blow impact, and he staggered, jerked to a halt, nearly went over.

His hat came off, bared his face to the light and his remaining opponents. He saw the shock in their eyes.

He snarled and got the Glock back in line, kept pulling the trigger. One of the two men jolted, stumbled backward, firing wildly, one-handed, winged but not down. The Glock locked out on the last round, he threw it away. Less than half a dozen meters now, he ripped the sharkpunch clear and up, aimed vaguely for both men, pulled the trigger.

The picture window shattered in the center, became a sudden, jagged-toothed mouth. The two men were both hurled back off their feet and hard against it, the remaining glass suddenly awash with red and clots of gore; the bodies fell in shredded chunks. Carl got to within two meters of the door, put another shot through on general principles, and then stopped.

Listen.

Faint scrabbling sound from within, off to the right. He threw himself inside, falling and twisting in the air, saw vague movement above the rise of a breakfast bar, and fired at it. Another gun went off at the same time, and he felt a second impact in the ribs. But the edges of the bar ripped apart in flying splinters, and the darkened form in the kitchenette behind blew backward. Wet, uncooked meat noise and a shriek. He hit the ground, skidded painfully into the back of a wood-frame armchair.

And everything stopped again.

This time for real.

“It’s simple enough,” he told Norton, after the interrogation was done. They were playing an inept game of pool on the garish orange table. “I don’t have to find Onbekend now. He’ll come to me.”

“If he doesn’t just have you picked off at whatever airport you’re planning to use.”

“Yeah, well, like I said they’re kind of busy right now. And I’ll be going in under a fresh identity. No COLIN badge, no UNGLA accreditation, no weapons, nothing to ring any bells.”

Norton paused, chin hovering over the cue. “No weapons?”

“Not as such, no. I aim to look like a tourist.”

“And this fresh identity.” The COLIN exec rammed his shot home. “I assume you’re looking to me for that.”

“No, I’ve got a friend back in London can handle that for me, have the stuff couriered across inside a day. What I need from you is the cash. Free wafers, untraceable back to COLIN. My credit still good for that?”

“You know it is.”

“Good. And can you persuade RimSec to keep Ferrer locked up somewhere until end of next week?

Make sure he doesn’t have a change of heart and go squawking down the wires to Bambarén?”

“I suppose so.” Norton looked vainly for position, tried a double, took it too fast and missed. “But look.

You don’t know this Jurgens will be there. What if she’s not sleeping yet?”

“It’s November, Norton.” Carl chalked his cue. “Jurgens was almost flaking out when I talked to her three weeks ago. She’s got to be under by now.”

“I thought they had drugs that’ll unlock the hibernation.”

“Yeah.” Carl lined up his shot, eased back with due regard for the scarred yellow wall behind him. Sharp snap and the target ball disappeared into a corner pocket as if sucked there by vacuum. The cue ball stood solid in its place. “I knew this hibernoid back on Mars, we used to go the same
tanindo
classes.

He was a private detective, occasional enforcer, too. Very tough guy, always getting into scrapes. I don’t think I ever knew him when he wasn’t carrying some kind of injury. And he told me that no beating he ever took hurt as much as the time he dosed himself with that wake-up shit.”

“Yeah, but if they’re worried about—”

“Norton, they don’t know any reason why I’d be coming after them like this. They don’t know Ertekin was anything to me. And if there’s going to be any COLIN fallout in the air, the very best thing Onbekend can do with his girlfriend right now is put her away somewhere safe and cozy for the next several months. Believe me, she’s there. Just a question of getting to her, digging in, and waiting for Onbekend to come running. And then killing the motherfucker.”

He slammed the next shot, rattled it in the jaws. It didn’t go down.

He peeled off his coat, unslung the sharkpunch, and dumped it on the kitchenette bar. He checked himself for damage. The Marstech impact jacket, disguised through airport security as part of his scuba gear, had soaked up the slugs he’d collected and left him with no worse than bruising, maybe a couple of cracked ribs. He pressed on the tender areas, grimaced, shrugged. He’d gotten off lightly.

So far.

He stripped the dead men of their weapons, piling them up on the shot-splintered breakfast bar. He dragged the worst of the wreckage from the man he’d killed in the kitchenette out the door and left him with his companions. He’d get the rest with a mop and bucket if there was time.

In the upstairs gallery of the lodge, he found a room that extended back into the cliff the house was built against. There was a heavy-duty lock on the door but he shot it out with one of his several newly acquired handguns. The door swung weightily inward on a curved womb-like space lit by subdued orange LCLS paneling at knee height along the walls. He found a panel of switches next to the door and flipped them until a harsher white light sprang up. Assumption confirmed—he’d found Greta Jurgens.

She lay like some dead Viking noblewoman on a broad, carved wood platform with lines that vaguely suggested a boat. Thick tangles of gray-green insulene foam netting supported her and wrapped her over.

Carl could smell the stuff as he stepped toward her, the signature nanotech reek of tightly engineered carbon plastics. He’d used the netting on Mars a lot, camping out on expeditions in the Wells uplands.

—Flash recall of sitting out in the warm glow of a heating element while the Martian night came on in all its thin-air glory, thick shingles of stars everywhere and the tiny, on-and-off tracery of burn-up from the leftover seed particles as they kept coming down, decades overdue for their date with atmospheric modification. Sutherland, staring up there at it all, pleased smile on the scarred ebony features, as if all of it, the sky and everything in it, had been put there just for him. Musing, nodding along with whatever it was the young Carl Marsalis had been bitching about. Soaking it up, then turning it around so Carl’d have to look at it from an angle that hadn’t occurred to him before.
You ever wondered, soak, if that doesn’t just mean…

Jurgens stirred just barely as the lights came up, but the down end of her cycle had her buried too deep for any substantial reaction. She was naked in the foam, skin taut and shiny with the adipose buildup, lidded eyes bruised and gummed shut with the secretions of the hibernoid sleep. Carl stood looking down at her for a long while, handgun at the end of his arm like a hammer. Images of the last month flickered behind his eyes like flames, like something burning down.

South Florida State. The Perez nanorack. Sevgi Ertekin beside him on the beach. New York, and the futon she made up for him. Gunfire in the street outside, the first warm crushing pressure as he flattened her under him.

Istanbul, the walk to Moda. The gleaming, glittering grins-in-darkness escaping feel to everything they did.

His mouth twitched upward in echo.

The wind across the stones at Sacsayhuamán. Sevgi leaned against the jeep at his back, the tight feeling of cover, of safety.

The road to Arequipa, her face in the soft dashboard glow.

San Francisco and
Bulgakov’s Cat,
the predawn view out of starboard loading.
Don’t gloat, Marsalis
.

It’s not attractive
.

Sevgi dead.

The smile fell off his face. He stared down at the sleeping woman.

Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?

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.

The mesh surged a little in the pit of his stomach, maybe aftermath of the firefight, maybe something else.

He thought of Sevgi’s eyes closing in the hospital. He stared at Jurgens like she was a problem he had to solve.

Only live with what you’ve done, and try in the future to do only what you’re happy to live with. That’s the whole game, soak, that’s all there is.

He reached out left-handed. Spread the foam netting a little thicker over the hibernoid’s body, pulled it up where one pale shoulder was exposed.

Then he went rapidly back to the door and killed the bright white LCLS, because something was happening to his vision that felt like blindness. He stood a moment in the warm orange gloom, looked twitchily around as if someone were there next to him, then slipped quietly out and closed the door behind him.

He moved along the gallery, checked doors until he found a darkened, windowless chamber with the fragrant hygiene reek of a woman’s bathroom. He stepped inside, touched the switch panel; more bright white light exploded across the pastel-tiled space. His own face mugged him from a big circular mirror in one wall-sweat-streaked whitener melting and smudging, the black coming up underneath, eyes ringed with the stuff like dark water at the bottom of a pair of pale psychedelic wells.
Fuck, no wonder the guys at the bridge freaked
. He supposed he owed Carmen Ren for the inspiration.

Wherever she was right now.

He wondered briefly if Ren would make it, if she’d stay ahead of the cudlips and the Agency the way she had before. He wondered if the child growing inside her would make it out into the world safely, and what would happen then. What Ren would have to do to protect it after that.

He remembered the level gaze, the way she’d backed him off with nothing more than a look and the way she stood, the reek of survivability that came off her as she faced him by the tower. Not a bad set of cards to play with. He thought she might be in with a better chance than most of her male counterparts.

Mostly, he was just glad he wouldn’t be the one sent to bring her down.

In a drawer beside the basin, he found capsules he recognized—codeine married to a tweaked caffeine delivery kick. They’d do for his ribs. He ran water from infrared taps into the broad, shallow scoop of marble in front of the mirror, soaped up, and started washing the white shit off his face. It took awhile.

When he’d gotten the worst off, he stuck his head under the tap and ran the water on his scalp and the back of his neck. He took one of Greta Jurgens’s pastel towels off the rail beside the basin and scrubbed himself dry with it, stared into the mirror again and didn’t scare himself so much this time.

Now let’s see if you can scare Onbekend.

He crunched up the codeine in his mouth, dry-swallowed a couple of times, tongued the clogged residue off his teeth, and rinsed it down with a swallow of water from the tap. He looked at himself once more in the mirror, as if his reflection might have some useful advice for him, then shrugged and extinguished the light.

He went downstairs to wait.